“Page not found” errors, as explained by ecologists

Inspired by Meg’s great find of “page not found” errors as explained by economists, here are “page not found” errors as explained by ecologists and evolutionary biologists. 🙂

Why wasn’t this page found?

Extinction

This page, like over 99% of all webpages that have ever existed, no longer exists.

Habitat loss

This server on which this page was stored has crashed.

Disease

A virus erased this page from the server.

Competitive exclusion

Our server has limited storage space. This page has been overwritten by another page.

Assisted migration

This page was moved to a new URL.

Evolution

This page has been modified, and so now exists in a different form.

Chaos

A small change in the HTML code for this site caused this page to vanish unpredictably.

Drift

By chance, this page has ceased to exist.

Balance of neutral drift and speciation

By chance, this page has ceased to exist. However, other pages just like this page are constantly being created. Why not visit one of those pages instead?

Detection error

This page may still exist, but your browser may have failed to find it. Please reload the page repeatedly to address this possibility, even at the cost of not visiting other pages instead.

Extinct in the wild

This page no longer exists, but a copy is preserved in Google’s cache.

Hunting

Too many people tried to view this page at once.

Nocturnal

This page is only viewable at night.

Metapopulation dynamics

This page no longer exists, but other pages still exist, and so the web as a whole still exists. Possibly, at some point in future this page will be restored by copying a page that still exists.

Global warming

The server overheated, preventing it from showing you this page.