The author of The Eastern Evil
The South China Sea is the largest and most widely distributed sea area of China's islands, according to the different directions, we divide the sea area of the islands into four regions, namely the Nansha Islands, the Xisha Islands, the Dongsha Islands and the Zhongsha Islands. Most of the islands are rich in vegetation, but there is one island with the most remarkable biodiversity, which is the East Island in the Paracel Islands.
According to scientific investigations, the East Island has a near-perfect natural ecosystem, and there are not only a variety of rare plants on the island, but also other animals. What surprised the scientific expedition personnel even more was that a herd of bison appeared on this island. It is understood that the East Island, like other islands, is relatively "young", that is, their formation history is generally not more than 10,000 years old, so why is there a bison herd on the island?
East Island is a small island in the eastern region of the Paracel Islands, the entire island area of about 1.7 square kilometers, relatively small, long strips, but as early as around 2000 scientists have proposed to conduct scientific research on the island. In 2003, a scientific expedition team landed on the East Island to carry out an expedition and found a herd of bison during the expedition. The number of bison in this herd is not small, more than 100, and the expedition team has seen bison herds in many places on the island, which indicates that the number of bison on the island is considerable, probably more than 400.
Due to the large number of bison found at that time, the expedition team was worried that too many bison would have a negative impact on the local ecology, so it recommended that the bison be killed in moderation. So every year after that, there will be cases of bison being artificially hunted on the island, and the purpose of the hunt is to control the number of bison to about 200. But in 2013, the expedition officers visited the island again and found that the number of bison had plummeted to about 50, which was lower than the expected target.
In order to protect the stability of the ecosystem of the East Island, the expedition team recommended that the killing of bison be suspended, so that the bison on the island have the opportunity to expand their populations. According to the scientific expedition, East Island is a young island that has experienced 3 ups and downs in the past 5,000 years, so the question is, where do these bison come from?
As mentioned earlier, most of the small islands in the Paracel Islands were formed in the past few thousand years, and they have also gone through many ups and downs, and the same is true of the East Island. Since the history of the East Island is relatively short, it is obvious that this herd of bison could not have evolved naturally, so how to find their roots? In order to solve this problem, the expedition team started from the area where the bison were daily active, and they found some clues in the cow dung.
The expedition selected three areas on the island where cow dung was concentrated and sampled them separately. The sampling here is not simply to collect the cow manure on the ground and then send it to the laboratory for testing, but to take a sample of the older cow manure in the underground sediment layer about 25 cm above the ground, and then perform mass spectrometry carbon-14 analysis on the sample, and find that the cow manure was formed about 350 to 390 years ago.
The researchers' similar samples from three cattle dung concentrations suggest that the herd of bison most likely landed on the East Island around the 1650s. In order to further determine the origin of this herd of bison, the scientific expedition staff searched for relevant historical records and verified them. In the 1650s, the mainland was in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties, a period of social unrest that forced many residents of the mainland to live on islands in the South China Sea.
Exiles bring production tools, crop seeds, livestock, etc. to the islands, including cattle. In other words, the bison on the East Island were domestic cattle more than 300 years ago, but later they flowed into the wild environment and gradually adapted to the ecosystem of the island. In fact, when the scientific expedition first saw the bison herd, they also suspected that they might not be pure bison, because they were similar to domestic cattle in appearance and behaved in the same way as domestic cattle.
summary
On a small island far from the mainland, hundreds of bison herds appeared, and it is impossible for them to have evolved through natural evolution. After a long period of identification and analysis by the scientific expedition personnel, it was finally determined that the identity of this group of bison was the domestic cattle brought to the island by the mainland displaced people in the late Ming and early Qing dynasties. After that, the living environment on the island may be harsh, and the displaced people choose to evacuate again, but they do not take the domestic cattle away, and the domestic cattle have to enter the wild environment in order to survive, and over time they are integrated into the ecosystem of the island.
The appearance of bison on the East Island shows that the ancients of our country have set foot on this land more than 300 years ago, and we are the first country to land on the island, so the ownership of the island naturally belongs to our country. Whether it is a small island like The East Island or other islands in the South China Sea, it has been the territory of our country since ancient times, and this cannot be refuted.