Im watching TV last night and a particularly sappy commercial, you know the ones, comes on for some wildlife fund. “We have to save the animals, to save ourselves” they implored to me, which got me thinking, well sortta…
What exactly would happen to the human race if all the wild animals died?? Would the loss of every lion, tiger, bear(oh my!) really impact us in someway? I could understand an ecological imbalance if say, one species that kept a particular crop eating species in check died, might cause us a problem. But what if every single wild species, I mean everything, just died? No insects, mammals, reptiles, etc…all dead. The only animals left would be those domesticated; cats, dogs, cows, chickens…etc
What would this really do to us, or the planet? Is there something they provide that we couldn’t make artificially? What would be the tragic outcome of such a thing? Would we even notice?
And for Pit’s sake, lets just not even argue over the right to life issue for animals. Im not saying WE should kill them all, just that they died.
The short answer is that we would be impoverished. This means our quality of life would suffer.
There are certain types of wealth that can only be held communally, not individually. Biological diversity is one of these. It’s value is inherent. There is no need to consider commercial applications of that wealth, although as pointed out those would be lost too.
Speaking personally I’ve lived in places rich with diversity and in places that are desert by comparison. I know which I prefer.
No single species on this planet evolved in a vacuum. (Well, I’m sure there’s an exception to that somewhere; let’s take that as a given since the odd exception is hardly relevant to this discussion.)
Each species evolved to occupy a “niche” in a huge, complicate, interconnected “system.” The shape and boundaries of each niche is defined by the shape and boundaries of other, adjacent or interrelated niches. None of these niches can stand for long on its own. If you were to suddenly eliminate the majority of these interrelated, intersupportive (new word!) niches and species, it wouldn’t be long until the remaining ones collapsed.
That’s oversimplified of course. But think of it this way: it’s the system that has been produced by evolution, just as much as any single organism. Or think of a house of cards, or that wooden-block game (Jenga or something?): you can remove one card or block at a time, carefully, by choosing only those individual blocks that are least supportive of the structure as a whole. Eventually, though, you run out of those, and the remaining blocks become more and more critical, and finally the structure collapses.
More insects than bees are used to pollinate plants. Many plants rely on birds to carry their seeds, too, so once you do away with the insects and birds, you’re killing off all the plants. No trees will mean no lumber. No leaves falling in the autumn to decompose and enrich the soil means that eventually there won’t be crop plants, either, because there won’t be compost fertilizer. Manure won’t decompose, because there won’t be any insects or worms to help with decomposition. So, the soil will be unable to support the crop plants.
In another realm, we’ll lose all the fish that eat insects. Once you lose some fish, you’ll lose the fish that eat them, so we’d be left with very little in the way of fish.
In short, ecological catastrophe.
The main problem, frankly, with any one species is that we just don’t know the consequences. Sprays kill off mosquitoes, which also kill off the birds that eat those mosquitoes, which kill off the plants that rely on those birds for spreading their seeds, which… It’s a system, and touching one element can have unforeseen consequences.
No animals = no plant pollinators, no seed dispersers, no seed sowers = no plants = death to humanity
No animals = no aeration of the soil, no breaking down of plant material, little remineralization of nitrogen and phosphorus = no plants = death to humanity
No animals = little remineralization of nitrogen and phosphorus to biological available forms in oceans and lakes = reduction in phytoplankton biomass = reduction in removal rate of carbon from atmosphere = acceleration of greenhouse effect = death to humanity.
I know I most certainly would. I have a cat sitting on me right now. Not a day passes by that you do not see an animal, unless you are blind.
Are we including things on the scale of plankton or E.coli? If were talking the death of everything not human, domesticated, plant, or fungi, there’d be a slight disruption in the oxygen cycle. Atmospheric oxygen would increase, and we’d all be in really good moods, for a while. Then the global fires would break out and we’d all die.
If the birds all died along with other insect eating species, I doubt if man could live two months. The insects would eat all the crops, the domesticated animals would starve to death. and we would all die shortly after. This world is a balance of all things. Pay attention to the commercial, it is correct.
I’m a hardcore aquarium head. One of the holy grails of many serious aquarists is the–ultimately impossible–perfectly balanced ecosystem within a fish tank. On an extremely simple, small scale, like those little sealed globes, such a thing is possible for limited periods of time. But the more complex the system–a simple home aquarium–the complexities and variables mutliply exponenentially. I’ve approached near equilibrium with a lot of plants and a very small fish population, but even as the system-in-a-box approached equilibrium, it never quite achieves it, and requires occasional intervention in the form of cleaning, or feeding, etc. Without such intervention, the system eventually becomes imbalanced and begins to collapse. Think of the global ecosystem as a similar system, only infinitely more complex. The extent of human intervention that would be required as such a vast system begins to break down is far beyond our current–and probably any future–technology. It would eventually break down beyond our ability to survive in it.
A farm (my proposed shorthand for any “ecosystem” comprising only domesticated animals) is pretty closely analogous to an aquarium: it’s an artificial ecosystem that requires human intervention to compensate for its lack of natural equilibrium.
Disrupting the global ecosystem to the point where it’s just one gigantic farm/aquarium, completely dependent upon human management, would, again, lead to an inevitable breakdown: we just don’t have the capability to perform such huge-scale husbandry.