Mosquitoes: Annoying parasites, but significant prey species.
Grizzly Bear: Salmon disposal & necessary nitrogen fertilizer dispenser
Giant Panda: Bamboo disposal?
What good are these creatures? In what way would their absence make any objective impact on the food web?
That’s not how it works; things don’t have to have a purpose or function, they exist because they can.
Except of course ‘can’ is becoming ‘cannot’ for the giant panda.
This is the same panda that, to paraphrase Edward Norton, won’t f*ck to save its own species from extinction?
I admit the lion’s share of the guilt for their extinction, as a human being. But damn. Some species just have the wrong end of the “adapt or perish” concept hardwired into their brains.
Honestly, if you haven’t been to the San Diego zoo, you should go sometime to see how they treat these animals. Enclosed area, water misters, special diets, no flash photography, et cetera and so on. They’re not Faberge eggs.
Thanks for the smack-down, I deserved that. The question was undeliberately vague. Allow me to rephrase:
The things are going the way of the dodo, is there any reason, apart from guilt, that we should be concerned about this? I refer specifically to the panda, and not what it’s impending extintion might mean with regard to our habits as humans and other, more obviously useful critter. Like moles, ticks and lobsters.
Sorry, it wasn’t meant to be snippy.
Pandas are at the top of their food chain; if they go missing, all it means is that the things they eat have a slightly easier time of it (actually, probably not, as long as there are other consumers there to take up the slack)
But the same sort of thing could be said of a lot of things; tigers, killer whales etc; they could disappear and the world wouldn’t come grinding to a halt (it didn’t when the dinosaurs disappeared, after all.
Bamboo grows and spreads like crazy. If there weren’t pandas around to eat it, it might take over all of China!!!
Ok maybe not. But bamboo does grow like crazy and pandas eat it, so…
David Quammen wrote a book called “Islands of Extinction” about species disappearing. (the title refers to the isolated nature preserves we now have in place of nature stretching from shore to chore and how that effects animal species) Anyway, he points out, as Mangetout does, that we’re not gonna get rid of nature enitrely. There will pretty much always be wild animals, there will just be waaaay fewer kinds of animals. Some adapt well, some don’t. If we don’t attempt to preserve diversity, we may be left with a world full of nothing but coyotes, rats, and pigeons…
And Keith Richards, Dick Clark and cockroaches…
The dodo, the Passenger Pigeon, the Carolina Parakeet, the Blue Pike, the Ivory-Billed Woodpecker, the Heath Hen, the Tasmanian Tiger-Wolf, the Great Auk, the Steller’s Sea Cow, the Dusky Seaside Sparrow …
Just because a species fills a very small niche doesn’t mean it’s worthless and doesn’t mean we have any right to wipe them out. It was discovered many years after the dodo’s extinction that a certain plant species on Mauritius needed the dodo to survive. The seeds of the plant had to make a trip through the dodo’s ailmentary tract in order to germinate. So even if we are not aware of a particular contribution of a species to the rest of it’s environment doesn’t mean there isn’t one.
It also isn’t that species fault if they lived in a small area and had a very specialized niche that served them well for hundreds or thousands of years until man came along and destroyed their environment or hunted them to extinction or the brink of it. It doesn’t mean they are weak and unadaptable, it took them hundreds/thousands of years to adapt to their specialization and man destroyed them before they could adapt again. The dodo was driven to extinction in under 100 years, the Stellar’s Sea Cow in 30 years, the Dusky Seaside Sparrow about 50 years.
What impact would their absence have? Well, for one thing it would be yet another failure of our stewardship of this planet. If we don’t learn from these mistakes, someday we may face the same fate by the same cause.
Well, that is one of the key drawbacks to specialization: increased vulnerability to extinction. Whether at the hands of man, or the whims of the environment, such species are constantly at greater risk than are generalist species. That is why if things continue as they are, we will ultimately be left with rats and pigeons and cockroaches and humans…we’re all generalists. It doesn’t make it right (in my opinion) that humans are destroying species willy nilly, but it does mean that specialists aren’t guaranteed a rosy future even if we left them alone.
“Nature, red in tooth and claw”, and all that.
Don’t forget the Pocket Fox! A rare animal that only existed for three weeks in the 16th century!
Well, I don’t think there is any question that we will face the same fate at some point. At not necessarily because we are poor stewards. Every creature has either gone extinct already, or will in the future. Including us. What is it, something like 99% of all forms of life ever to live are extinct. We are no different.
But I accept your point that as long as we are here and in control, we ought to do our part to let other creatures prosper as well. But 6 billion people will soon be 10 billion. A little dishearting.
Also from a more pragmatic viewpoint, many creatures and plants, espeically ones that exploit rather small niches have evolved ways to cope with their enviroment that might not only be unique, but might also be extremely valueable for us to study / understand / and replicate from a medical standpoint.
With friends who work in the pharmaceutical industry, you never know what unintended effects you are going to get (some so positive they become your revised goal) when you try to understand and treat a specific condition.
rainy
You are basically correct. If we ignore the “butterfly effect”, there just aren’t enough Giant Pandas around that it would make any difference to the ecosystem if they went extinct. There are probably a lot of large mammals that fall in that category, including (unfortunately) the non-human great apes.
More generally, how does something as specialized as the Giant panda eveolve? It eats bamboo (and only one species), it has a paw modified to grasp bamboo stems, It also has an extremely low reproduction rate, and conception can only happen once a year. Such an animal is very vulnerable to extinction-what do they do when the bamboo flowers and dies off?
In response to the OP:
Mosquitos: prey species
Grizzly Bear: salmon disposal
Giant Panda: looks cute!
May I be a bit impolite?:
Yes, it will be a pity if the Panda goes the way of the dodo.But it won’t be a tragedy.
Yes, I know, ecologists love to point out the we will never know the damage done, until it is too late, etc , etc. And they are right.
But I’m being un-politically correct here, so let’s consider for a moment:
–The American Buffalo–
In its original habitat, the buffalo roamed in HUGE herds , tens of thousands of animals, weighing a ton each.The herd moved in mass, eating all the prairie plants, and leaving millions of heavy footsteps and dung piles.Result: it destroyed everything in its path.
We are lucky that the cowboys solved our problem for us, by hunting buffalo into near extinction. If not, how would people live today in Nebraska when a two-mile wide herd of huge animals started to cross the highway and head into town?
The prairie is gone, the largest animal in its ecosystem is gone.
Disturbing mother nature can lead to disaster–but it can also have surprisingly little effect.
(the problem is that we never know which , until it’s too late)
Now wait just a minute. Our “stewardship of the planet?”
Now I don’t want this to turn to personal attacks, but I’ve heard similar sentiments from others in the past. And I have to ask – isn’t that kind of thinking rather arrogant on our part?
Mother Nature existed long before we got here, and will probably exist long after we’re dust in the wind. We bear some responsibility to our planet and surroundings, in order to keep them clean and diverse for the benefit of our future offspring. But to suggest that we even have the power to destroy something like our entire global ecosystem discounts the power that life itself has.
Species live, and species die. This is the way of evolution. To suggest that we have some power over that is somewhat obtuse. We may have control over the species we kill, but we hardly have control over life itself on this planet.
I think, in general, we fight to keep certain species alive despite their evolutionary lack of ability to adapt. And that, to me, is wrong. We’re basically forcing pandas to breed, because they won’t on their own, for God’s sake. Does no one else find that appalling?
In the long timeline of Earth, humankind if but a fraction of a second. And when you and I are gone, life will find a way to go on. I’m afraid stewardship gives us far more credit than we deserve, frankly.
Anyway, nothing personal intended to your remarks. I believe we’ve developed a moral sense of what’s right or wrong, but make no mistake – we’re only along for the ride as long as it lasts.
Well it eats, shoots & leaves. So, if you like, it fills the basic requirements of a grammarian.
There is no such thing as an “evolutionary lack of ability to adapt”. Species do not go extinct because they lack the ability to adapt, they go extinct because they are, for whatever reason(s), unable to adapt quickly enough to the environmental changes they are faced with. Infrequent mating coupled with long gestation periods and specialized diet are not inherent drawbacks; they simply preclude rapid recovery in the event of drastic population decline. If the environment changed slowly enough, they would almost certainly be able to adapt in order to keep pace.
The problem, of course, is that their environment hasn’t changed slowly enough for them to keep up, given their current adaptations.
But wouldn’t you say their inability to adapt quickly enough automatically puts them in the evolutionary crosshairs?
I’m not saying humankind bears no responsibility for their demise, but let’s face it. We’re forcing them to breed. This does not speak of adaptibility, given their current surroundings.