• ch00f@lemmy.world
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    2 days ago

    A friend of mine dedicated his life to birds and wildlife. He spent six months in Argentina weighing and banding penguins, worked to design autonomous buoys that track ocean data, and his personal birdwatching species count was over, 10k.

    He passed away suddenly last March at the age of 33. He just got married the month before.

    As tragic as his death was (especially for his widow), part of me thinks that there was some mercy in him dying so young rather than potentially living a long life of watching everything he cared about and worked to save get destroyed.

    • sunbytes@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      This is a sort of “but it’s weird that it happened twice” thing, but I had a friend out researching Orangutans in I think Indonesia and he dropped dead after (supposedly) recovering from a fever.

      Probably only a few years younger than your friend.

      I’ve not kept up with his research but I suspect the species is almost certainly declining worse than when he was there.

      Not sure what I’m saying, but yeah.

      Weird that it happened twice.

      • ch00f@lemmy.world
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        2 days ago

        Yeah in this case, he dropped dead in a university lab. Nobody else was with him. Fucker was a marathon runner. Nobody knows what happened, but nobody suspects foul play.