Eli5 : Why is biodiversity important ?
In: Biology
If everything is genetically the same, then a virus or bacteria that becomes good at infecting one, becomes good at infecting all. We are seeing this with bananas. Bananas are a mutated plant and do not produce seed. Pretty much all banana plants everywhere on the earth were put there by a person who has taken a cutting from another plant’s roots. Therefore, there are only a handful of actual different banana plants in the world. When a virus mutates into something that hurts a banana plant, they all quickly become infected and perish. We have seen entire types of bananas become extinct in only a couple generations.
(Every once in a while, a plant will throwback to the seed bearing pods and from these we can get new banana types but it’s rare)
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