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
There are lots of reasons why biodiversity is important, but I haven’t seen an important one mentioned yet.
It’s import because we have humans have decided to value it. There are species of no ecological importance (Death Valley pupfish are classic example) that we conserve because we value biodiversity for it’s own sake.
We value the continued existence of species for their own sake, not necessarily because they provide value to us.
High biodiversity equates to higher stable ecosystems. One way to think about it is having redundant systems. If I’m an insect eater, with 5 species I like to eat, and one does really poorly, I have 4 others I can predate on.
From a human-centric view, one of those 5 species of insect may produce a compound that cures a disease or provide a unique model for some new material.
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.
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
Every living thing plays multiple roles that we don’t always see. Sometimes the way we figure out that we need biodiversity is when we don’t have any! For example, industrial farming in the United States is single crop farming, and each plant has different individual needs of soil. Some plants suck all the nutrients out of soil and leave it pretty infertile. Other plants actually add nutrients to the soil, creating richer more fertile places for other plans to grow. When you have a balance of all the different kind of plants on soil, what you get is a cycle that both takes and gives nutrients to the soil. That’s a plant example at least!
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