Basically, is there anything that we now really, really wish we hadn’t wiped out? The passenger pigeon? The Quagga? The Tasmanian tiger? I don’t mean something that’s gone that we now say “Gee, what a shame”; I mean is there anything that we now say “Oh $#!&, we screwed ourselves! If only we’d known better!”. Like when the Chinese thought getting rid of all the sparrows was a good idea.
Narrowing biodiversity is acknowledged to be one of the most serious threats facing humans.
Sorry, no cite for this first answer to OP.
The extinction of honeybees isn’t quite complete yet, and perhaps they can recover, but if they go, there will be some alterations in the global food supply.
The problem is (As Jared Diamond pointed out in his book Collapse) “new normalism.” Or that frog being slowly boiled in a pot idea. Extinctions take long enough that we don’t really notice the consequences. (A hypothetical past) you knows that there are only small flocks of passenger pigeons around, but roll your eyes when great-grampa talks about how when he was a kid the sky was filled with them. The smaller number is normal for that you, just like an absence of them is normal now.
The biggest one that I can think of is how much different the whole world probably would have been if horses hadn’t became extirpated in North America 12ish thousand years ago. The jury is out on whether or not the Clovis culture was responsible for the extinction, but either way, if they had still been around, and had been domesticated as a draft and riding animal in the Americas, Native American cultures would have been different, Native American technological growth would have been different, and the outcomes of encounter with Europeans would have been different. Maybe not two cultures on equal technological footing, but it would have been less of a fish-in-barrel shooting. So the local extinction of the horse should count as a big “oopsy!” from the native point of view.
Technically, all the dinosaurs and the fauna they fed upon is largely extinct, and that has certainly ‘impacted’ humans – it provides the petroleum that still powers most of our civilization, and is now poisoning our air.
Petroleum mainly comes from plankton and algae, not dinosaurs or other macroscopic animals. I suppose it’s possible (likely, even) that a lot of petroleum came from organisms that are now extinct, or whose modern-day descendants have evolved into different species.
It was pretty economically disruptive in the Mediterranean when silphium went extinct.
Back in the days of sail, when “preserved food” meant heavily smoked or salted stuff, sailors really liked to eat fresh local fauna, if they could get it. I suspect they wiped out a lot of easily caught local species, which lead to a serious impact on their diet, although not enough to halt the Age of Sail.
One bird thus affected was the Dodo (whose name might be onomatopoeic – early sources give the name as “doo - doo”, possibly its call). Although they were referred to as “Nauseating birds”, apparently because of the flavor, it was probably better and healthier than heavily salted beef weeks in cask.
The codfish is very nearly extinct, ending several centuries of Eastern Canada’s traditional economy. This extinction took place quickly, over a few decades, caused largely to the development of factory trawlers, that could virtually vacuum the codfish out of the Grand Banks and process them at sea. The cod fishery peaked at 800,000 tons in the last century, and stocks are now estimated to be less than 1% of that. Part of the cause of the cod reduction was the abolition of the harp seal hunt, which protected huge populations of a major natural predator on the remaining cod.
The problems are more likely to arise from our extermination of something that was keeping another thing in check, than our extermination of a thing we like to eat - in the latter case, sure, we just need to make some dietary adjustments, but in the former case, something we previously weren’t very conscious of, suddenly becomes a problem that spirals out of control.
Example (credit: Blue Planet Series 2) - The Southern Sea Otter was hunted nearly to extinction for their fur - this allowed invertebrate populations to explode (urchins, I think), and these animals over-grazed kelp forests, leaving them barren - destroying the nursery environment required by a vast range of other species (including those that we like to eat, or that our food likes to eat).
Fortunately, that one appears to have been clawed back from the brink, so it’s not an example of where it did go wrong, just an example of where that nearly happened.
The extinction of the dinosaurs had a much bigger impact on humans than that.
This being GQ, you should be aware that this is factually incorrect. Not only does the frog jumps out, but the one thrown into already boiling water usually dies. I’m surprised how often it’s used on this MB. There’s a wikipedia article on it:
Perhaps some of the massive animals, which could have helped with the soil for farming for loosening it up, fertilizing it, and being used as a beast of burden.
There was an interesting piece on NPR about the extinction of the Passenger Pigeon last month. Someone has been extracting passenger pigeon DNA from extant samples, and they have been looking at their properties and behaviors. It seems likely that they adapted to living in huge groups, and couldn’t survive if their numbers started to drop, a sort of feedback loop that got increasingly worse.
I suppose the Indians may have used the passenger pigeons as a readily available food source, but the European colonists only had a couple of hundred years to exploit them before they wiped the pigeons out. Not really long enough to have to rely on them.
For an odd nominee: possibly Silphium.
Next you’ll be telling me that foxes really don’t give scorpions rides across rivers!
Not so much extinction, but being destroyed to almost extinction has a severe impact.
History is replete with examples of humans destroying their environment, wiping out the species in a local area to their own long term detriment. The cod in the Gulf of St. Lawrence (and east coast of Canada) is one example mentioned. Successive governments did not have the will to limit local fisheries or constrain the foreign fishing until for a few years, lowering quotas each year not enough, fishermen could no longer even catch their small quotas. Allegedly it’s starting to come back, but still nowhere near the bounty it was in the early days. (Read Farley Mowat’s “Sea of Slaughter” for a detailed investigation of what we’ve done to the wildlife.)
There are ongoing debates over what caused the Easter Island community to collapse, citing climate change, civil war, rats eating all the tree nuts, or chopping down the trees for rollers for the giant head sculptures… but the fact is the island was stripped bare of trees and there were no replacements growing; so the locals could not make decent canoes, and could not fish effectively to feed themselves.
Similarly, one common wisdom says that the cow is sacred in India because in the heavily populated areas, locals have taken down most of the trees that would provide fuel for cooking; the only appreciable supply of fuel left is dried cow patties. You can see these drying or stacked in large piles along the roads in India.
Whalers, mostly from the USA, almost drove the whale population world-wide to extinction in the late 1800’s - probably the first case of a global drive to extinction. This drove the search for alternatives, which landed on petroleum - which gave us a massive petrochemical industry, and conveniently, allowed everyone (except Japan and a few other countries) to forget about whaling.
So it’s not so much extinction that can cause the problem, as local destruction of an important resource through lack of foresight or simply greed… Look up “the tragedy of the commons”. When nobody owns a resource, it’s there for the taking, then the simplest imperative is to take as much as you can as fast as you can. If you leave some of that for a later time, someone else will scoop it up before it accomplishes the growth you expected.
Mentioned in post #7
Actually, altho hungry sailors undoubtedly did their part, it was the rats, pigs, goats , etc that they introduced that did the real damage.
*
wiki:
Like many animals that evolved in isolation from significant predators, the dodo was entirely fearless of humans. This fearlessness and its inability to fly made the dodo easy prey for sailors.[88] Although some scattered reports describe mass killings of dodos for ships’ provisions, archaeological investigations have found scant evidence of human predation. Bones of at least two dodos were found in caves at Baie du Cap that sheltered fugitive slaves and convicts in the 17th century, which would not have been easily accessible to dodos because of the high, broken terrain.[10] The human population on Mauritius (an area of 1,860 km2 or 720 sq mi) never exceeded 50 people in the 17th century, but they introduced other animals, including dogs, pigs, cats, rats, and crab-eating macaques, which plundered dodo nests and competed for the limited food resources.[43] At the same time, humans destroyed the forest habitat of the dodos. The impact of the introduced animals on the dodo population, especially the pigs and macaques, is today considered more severe than that of hunting.[89] Rats were perhaps not much of a threat to the nests, since dodos would have been used to dealing with local land crabs.[90]
It has been suggested that the dodo may already have been rare or localised before the arrival of humans on Mauritius, since it would have been unlikely to become extinct so rapidly if it had occupied all the remote areas of the island.[55] A 2005 expedition found subfossil remains of dodos and other animals killed by a flash flood. Such mass mortalities would have further jeopardised a species already in danger of becoming extinct.[91] Yet the fact that the dodo survived hundreds of years of volcanic activity and climactic changes shows the bird was resilient within its ecosystem.[57]*
Yes, the codfish has been greatly reduced, and this does effect humans, fish is more expensive and we had to trun to other species.
But I dont think the harp seal hunt has mch to to do with it, since the cods in the Grand Banks in the 1500’s (long before the harp seal was hunting in great numbers) was incredibly numerous.