Fundamentals of Conservation Biology. Malcolm L. Hunter, Jr.. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Malcolm L. Hunter, Jr.
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Биология
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781119144175
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and sowing, or the risk of soil erosion.

      Second, wild species may be a source of new domesticates in the future. Domestication is almost as old as humanity, and it is still practiced (Meyer et al. 2012). To take two examples, salt‐tolerant plants may be domesticated to use on farmlands degraded by salinization (Rozema et al. 2013) and some of the nearly 2000 species of insects that people consume for food could be prime candidates for domestication (van Huis et al. 2013). Some of the food items that we associate with wild species are already produced primarily using captive populations; for example, most of the venison sold in markets comes from deer farms and most of the salmon and shrimp we eat are raised through aquaculture.

Photos depict a handful of fruits [top], to the rather unusual, such as fruit bat soup in Guam [bottom].

      (Malcolm L. Hunter Jr., author) [top]; Courtesy of Merlin D. Tuttle/Bat Conservation International [bottom])

       Medicine

      There was a time when essentially all of our medicines, like all of our foods, came directly from wild organisms. Traditional medicines remain a conspicuous and valuable legacy of this past. This is especially true in developing countries where most of the world’s population resides and where much of the population may still depend on herb markets and herbalists as the primary source of medicine. It is also true in industrialized countries where herbal medicines are worth billions of dollars per year (Fabricant and Farnsworth 2001). A less obvious legacy persists in modern pharmaceuticals, about half of which include chemicals directly obtained from organisms or originally isolated and identified in an organism and then later synthesized by chemists (David et al. 2015). If you include non‐active ingredients the proportion is larger. For example, next time you are at a pharmacy read the ingredients list for the widely used hemorrhoid treatment “Preparation H”; you will find five diverse species represented as shark liver oil, beeswax, corn oil, sheep lanolin, and thyme oil. It is nearly impossible to attach a monetary figure to all of these values, but it is almost certainly in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year (Principe 1996; Kumar 2004).

Photo depicts silphion that was a plant of such great commercial value that it was depicted on Greek coins.

      (CNG Coins/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY‐SA 3.0)

      Medicines derived from microorganisms include penicillin, tetracycline, and most other antibiotics, as well as a variety of vaccines, hormones, and antibodies (Cragg and Newman 2013). Better understanding of the role of the microbiome that occupies the bodies of larger organisms is likely to have profound implications for the practice of medicine, for people, domestic species, and those wild species that demand our attention (Qin et al. 2010; Huttenhower et al. 2012; Redford et al. 2012). An intriguing study from Finland found that young people living in diverse settings (as measured by the diversity of plant species and different types of land use) were less likely to suffer from allergies and this was tied to the diversity and abundance of beneficial bacteria found on their skins (Hanski et al. 2012).