How does biodiversity prevent infectious diseases?
In: Biology
It doesn’t “prevent infectious disease”, it “prevents a single infectious disease from wiping out the whole ecosystem”.
Consider the banana. The original banana, the one banana flavoring tastes like, was the Gros Michel. It was the only banana widely cultivated † in large quantities until the 1820s. A single disease, called Panama Disease from the location the fungus was first recognized, wiped out all the Gros Michel bananas in the world over a few years. Not learning the lesson, humans shifted for the Cavendish banana species and made even larger ecosystems of this single cloned species. Now Tropical Race 4, a relative of panama disease is wiping out all the Cavendish banana plants.
† Ignoring plantains and other cooking bananas, which are a very different food to most people.
Organism gets good at affecting one thing.
If everything is same thing, everything is vulnerable. If everything is different things, only a few things are vulnerable.
If I have 25 dogs in my home and a dog Killing virus enters, were in for 25 deaths.
If i have one dog, one cat, on spider, two unicorns, a rat, my girlfriend, a bird, three fishes and a snake, the virus will Kill 1/12 of my animals.
Now if we move this out of my home in a place where the living animals have a direct impact on the nature of the ecosystem around them (aka anywhere), you can see it even better
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