Many species go extinct every day and scientists and activists fight to keep endangered species alive.
But I never questioned why we actually need a larger variety of Flora and Fauna.
Let’s look at the cheetah for example. A very fascinating animal I personally would hate to see go extinct. But they have clear flaws. They have very short stamina, meaning once they kill their prey they are to weak to defend it from other predators like hyenas. They can’t carry their food onto a tree and they are not the most social creatures. They are getting outclassed by others. Isn’t it the natural course, that the weaker ones go extinct?
I ofcourse completely disregarded the impact humans have on this example.
So the question is, why do we care? What effects would it have on the eco system if only very few species where alive?
In: Biology
Lets look at plants first, particularly potatoes
There are lots of different types of potatoes grown today, but what if there weren’t?
What if we only grew one type, lets call them Irish Lumpers, and they’re really good at feeding people so we just replace all the other crops with them. Now we’re swimming in potatoes and everyone is fed and everything is great! Then one day a blight comes along that your breed of potatoes is particularly susceptible to. All of your potato crops die because they’re *all the same breed* which means your people starve, and die.
This was the cause of the Irish potato famine which killed over 1 million people and displaced another million.
By keeping other species and cultivars of plants around you can fall back on the others if one is heavily impacted by a disease or environmental change. Everything fills a niche and you have no idea what their particular role is and how interconnected things are, and particularly what faults a certain species can help others make it through.
For animals, what if something comes through and takes out most of the large prey in the area. Without prey the lions will be forced to move elsewhere or die while the much smaller cheetah can survive on significantly less food and will be able to spring back better when the food sources return.
Its hard to know how interconnected things are, but we do know if we kill something off we can’t bring it back, its just gone for good so its best not to play jenga by burning the blocks.
A brief explanation using the cheetah example.
If the cheetah were to go extinct then their prey would begin to overpopulate without that natural population control.
This could lead to any number of problems including disease and dust storms/erosion (prey animals over-eat the vegetation that keeps the soil intact with it’s roots).
Great question. Let’s make an example here.
Yellowstone. Yellowstone used to have wolves. Wolves would eat the elk, elk eat the plants, where the smaller animals live.
Wolves were exterminated in Yellowstone over a century ago, all gone. The result was devastating. Those herds of elk exploded. There were tons of them, but they started starving because they were eating *all of the plants*. Young trees would be eaten before they could grow, so the forests just… stopped growing.
The songbirds had nowhere to nest. Beavers had no trees to use for their dams. With no dams, streams started to erode, and rivers changed their paths, which made it even harder for the trees to grow. There was only one colony of beavers left.
25 years ago, wolves were brought back to Yellowstone. The results are hopeful. With the elk population controlled by the wolves, aspen and willow trees and plants are growing. Beaver populations are returning, building dams that are fixing the rivers. There are *nine* colonies of beavers in Yellowstone now, and their dams do so so much for rivers that require their own comment. Foxes have returned because mice have a place to hide in the brush.
We must be very careful not to upset the balance, because removing an animal from the food chain could be like kicking a pebble down a mountain, only for it to cause an avalanche. So we must protect every species, however small or useless seeming they are. They could be feeding or preying upon other animals that could tip the scales and create consequences that we can’t even dream of.
You’re not wrong that some animals naturally go extinct without threatening the health of the planet. However, there are two good reasons why humans should consider explicitly protecting species from going extinct.
1) It’s impossible to disregard the impacts that humans have on the chance of survival for any given species. There’s the obvious case of the many species we have explicitly hunted to (near) extinction, but human activities also tend to pollute or destroy the natural habitats of many others. This alone might not be enough to send them to extinction, but it makes their existence more precarious. If the cheetahs go extinct, it may be because they were evolutionary “losers,” but all species are now playing a much much harder game than they were a millennium ago. This means that far more than the natural number of species will lose, unless we intervene to support them.
2) We protect the cheetah because we can. Whether to preserve biodiversity, because they may one day directly benefit us, or because we just think they’re cool, there are plenty of good reasons to keep cheetahs and other endangered species around. These reasons may not win out over the needs that drive their endangerment (like expanding human civilization into their habitats), but they should at least be heard, and the people who feel motivated by them should act.
This may well become moot at some far future date where humans can bioengineer viable new animals. However, for now we can only play with what nature has provided and should be careful about breaking our toys.
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