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Who
needs bats? We hardly ever see the pesky creatures. They surface here
and there, flitting ominously out of half-forgotten old attics,
terrorizing good, honest folks who just want to find that old stack of
1950's photo albums. They're a nuisance. So, who needs 'em?...Well,we
do. In one night of foraging one bat can capture a thousand mosquitoes.
With the advance of climate change, bats and other mosquito-eaters will
come in handy to curb the invasion of tropical diseases into northerly
regions. Something to consider as a mysterious disease, first
discovered in New York State, is killing thousands of bats and is
moving westward.
cal
jungles, scour the globe for the last pools of oil and remove mountain
tops or sage plains to turn coal into greenhouse gases.
We
know that we will be more susceptible now, as those tropical diseases
advance toward our "civilized" northern countries. We know that factory
ships—which can catch species of fish that were "in the old days"
simply thrown back as bycatch—are destroying the ocean populations.
Many medium size fish species take several
So, who needs black-footed ferrets?
years
to reach reproductive status, and, as factory ships ravage the
existing populations, their reproductive capacity goes steadily
downward. This is one of the many subtleties of ecosystems we choose to
ignore—the interlocking of reproductive capacities.
When
we Europeans arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries on the
land mass now known as the United States, Canada and
It's
a seemingly insurmountable struggle for us wilderness and
ecosystem-lovers to convince our fellow citizens that an impoverished
ecosystem is a threat to their very existence. Yet, while we remain
blinded in scientific ignorance, the sky is falling. We still are not
aware of the far-reaching effects the extinction of a species like
black-
footed
ferret could have on us humans. How about blue whales? The largest
animals we have ever known, the mammals can reach up to 150 tons; they
are baleen whales, feeding on tiny organisms that they strain from sea
water. After decades of whaling, the species is dying out, and, again,
we do not invest enough in zoological field studies to begin to know
whether the extinction of blue whales will make any difference to
humanity. We can't say precisely how our acidification of the ocean,
and the changes we have wrought in species composition, have impacted
the feeding patterns of the great mammals, or worsened the conditions
of the already depleted population.
Mexico,
the seas were alive with all sorts of fishes and other forms of life,
all carrying out their respective roles in ecosystems, some seemingly
trivial, some very important. The riches of the oceans and the land
were astonishing. But, since our arrival, we have disrupted those
balances. Today the oceans are being acidified, a byproduct of global
warming; coral reefs are disappearing, taking with them the many forms
of life that based their lives on corals. Today a few hundred thousand
buffalo persist on protected lands, the last remnants of huge
thundering herds that thrived on the bunch grasses—perennials—the
dominant vegetative cover of the Great Plains. Without those protected
areas, the buffalo could not survive on the modern plains, which have
been ploughed under with crops like corn and wheat and the other
grains—annuals— and lie barren, open to the ravages of wind and rain,
after each yearly harvest.
Remember that a huge proportion of species now with us are already on the endangered list. Yet we continue to chop down tropi-
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