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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own nurturing instincts. In other words, people love living things, a phenomenon called “biophilia” by E. O. Wilson (1984).

      Sometimes, our feelings for other species are revealed in the ways we spend our money; sometimes, they are not. Imagine a woman who lives her whole life in landlocked Kazakhstan who will never see a living blue whale, but who derives pleasure from simply knowing that blue whales exist. Her love for whales is real and valuable, but costs her nothing. It is hard for society to account for feelings like hers when making policy decisions because economic issues are usually paramount, and her feelings are not easily expressed in monetary units. But this does not make her feelings unimportant. It also does not diminish the political impact of her feelings. For example, the decision to curtail exploiting Newfoundland’s baby harp seals for their fur was made not because it was unsustainable (harp seals are doing well) but because of the deep feelings of people who had no direct contact with harp seals and no economic stake in their fate. Economists are trying to devise methods for estimating the monetary value of blue whales and harp seals for people whose only relationship with them is knowing that they exist; we will discuss existence values further in Chapter 16, “Economics.”

      Scientific and Educational Values

Photo depicts biologists attach a radio-transmitter to a giant armadillo in Emas National Park Brazil.

      (Courtesy of Leandro Silveira)

Photo depicts a person climbed up and down almost 10 m of glass, at times carrying a 20 kg load.

      (DARPA/Public domain [Left]; Mr.B‐king/Shutterstock [Right])

      Of course, scientific inquiry is just an advanced form of the intellectual curiosity about the world that begins in infancy. Our education would suffer greatly without a diverse world to explore, without bean seeds to plant and follow to germination, without frog eggs to watch develop into tadpoles. Whether we want to learn about ourselves or the world we share with other species, we need models to observe.

      Ecological Values

      Every population of every species is part of an ecosystem of interacting components, and thus has an ecological role to play. There are producers, consumers, decomposers, competitors, dispersers, pollinators, and more. In this sense, every species has ecological value, that is, instrumental use to other species that share the same ecosystem, including people.

      Although all species have ecological roles, not all have roles of equal importance. Some species are ecologically important simply because of their great abundance. Often these are called dominant species, a term that usually implies that they constitute a large portion of the biomass of an ecosystem. Examples are sugar maples in a sugar maple forest or various species of planktonic copepods in many marine ecosystems. Sometimes, they are called controller species, which implies that they have major roles in controlling the movement of energy and nutrients. This would include dominant species such as sugar maples and various copepods, as well as many species of invertebrates, bacteria, and fungi that are important decomposers but may not have much biomass.

      Photos depict the ecological impacts of keystone species that take many forms. The sea star (a) is a keystone species because its predatory activities allow many species to coexist, while beavers (b) shape entire communities because of flooding by their dams. Photo depicts a beaver biting a wooden log.