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
This will be a huge simplification, but I hope it paints a nice image.
Imagine the ecosystem as a bunch of tables stacked onto each other. Each species is a leg on one of the tables. These might be at the bottom, or high up. If you remove a leg or two from one of the tables at any level, it’s often fine, but with each one removed it becomes more and more unstable. At a certain point, the table missing too many legs collapses, potentially bringing down everyone sitting on top of it, or crushing down to layers below.
In a less figurative sense: each species often competes for a niche in a system that has evolved around them. They might have several competitors, or they might be alone in their niche, but often they’re part of a carefully balanced ecosystem where each species might tune the balance of the species around them (or, some species might depend entirely on another). Predators keep prey in check, and prey allow predators to survive, but expand this idea to an entire web of weird dependencies and such and you get an idea. Removing species can have unpredicted or disastrous consequences, or it might be fine… but you lose one of the legs of the table, so where you could’ve also lost another species, now you CANT because losing both is what causes it to start collapsing.
Also half related example of biodiversity being important: a single monoculture crop. Diverse crops can withstand disease, as only part of the population is likely to suffer, but if you lack diversity, and only have a single strain, a disease can completely wipe _everything_ out. There’s not much room at all to absorb dangers like that without diversity.
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