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
What appear to be inconsequential changes to environments almost always have huge unforeseen implications later down the line.
Preserving how things are prevent these disasters.
As a real example, overfishing of an area leads to a reduction in the large predatory fish. This theoretically would sort itself out in a matter of months, however:
In actuality this leads to a surge in smaller fish who eat plant life/plankton type species. This then causes a shortage of available food for the even smaller creatures who then have their numbers vastly reduced.
This then weirdly causes a huge surge in algae on the surface of the water as it is suddenly able to reproduce faster than it is being eaten.
The algae grows so thick that it blocks light and reduces oxygen levels in the water eventually causing an extinction event killing all aquatic life in the area. This will also affect land creatures and can continue causing issues elsewhere. This is called a Fish Kill and happens often enough that it has a name. The initial causes vary but something knocks the biodiversity out of balance and causes a cascading chain of events.
Disclaimer: this is one potential scenario and is not the case every time.
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