Genuine question. I was talking to someone recently and they asked me this and while I had some answers (mentioned below), I didn’t have confidence in my answers.
I know climate change is a threat to biodiversity and that it’s important to preserve it but I was never told why biodiversity is important. Is it to keep ecosystems in check (I feel like this is probably one of the most important reasons)? Is it to just give humans a bunch of species to look at and appreciate? Is it to ensure that if the human population died, some forms of life would remain that would be fit for whatever catastrophe affected human populations and keep life going?
Is it all of these things? Any other reasons?
Thank you!
In: Biology
Probably a lot of benefits but the big one I think of is balancing and sustaining the environment
Example – people breathe in oxygen and produce CO2 as a waste product then plants use CO2 in photosynthesis and produce oxygen as a waste product. If we got rid of all the photosynthesis users oxygen would become a scarce resource and CO2 would build up changing the environment making it become unlivable for people
Actually systems are more complicated and have a cycle of organisms consuming things that others can’t and producing things that others need.
If everything in the ecosystem is the same or too similar the resources they need get harder to find or just get used up completely and are replaced with waste products they can’t use. The ecosystem has changed to a point where it can’t support the life it used to.
With biodiversity there are enough different roles going on everything needed for everyone is being constantly resupplied.
And even if it seems like multiple species are basically doing the same thing – 1 they are probably doing it in slightly different ways that are helping different food chains, and 2 it’s good to have a back up in case something happens that makes it too difficult for one to thrive
Ecosystems are a complicated web of interconnected relationships between species and not all of them are direct or obvious so it’s hard to predict how removing a species will affect all the others
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