The one factor that needs to be considered is simply confirmation bias - once we get into our heads an idea like "there's something mysterious going on with animals dying in droves everywhere", we instinctively start looking for evidence to confirm our idea. And whatever it is you look for, you tend to find.
Reporters are certainly not immune to this, and in fact, they know that one type of a news report, if it gets popular, generates an appetite for more similar news reports. This means that if you get a news story of a bunch of fish dying in a lake, and it gains attention, the reporter who wants a good story will start to look for anything similar.
So suddenly you get a bunch of reports of all kinds of animals dying.
This may not, in fact, be anything particularly out of the ordinary, but rather it seems to be so because now our attention has been shifted, and we're LOOKING FOR such occurrances.
Looking at the cases, it seems extremely unlikely that a single cause, or even a related series of causes, would be responsible for them all, or even most of them. These things happen, and the globe is quite big - if you look for them, you'll find them. Sometimes a single population of a single species gets wiped out by a disease, or by a freak weather event, or by some environmental stress driving them to unusual behavior, which leads them to danger.
Of course it is interesting, and even important to investigate the causes of events like this, but keep a level head about it, and don't go drawing wild inferences out of the very human tendency to gravitate towards one kind of story at one time, and thus ending up with a distorted and false view that this one kind of event would be happening more at this particular time.
Modifié par Swordfishtrombone, 06 janvier 2011 - 12:45 .