Why Species Matter

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24 August 2011 Last updated at 05:22 ET

Tom Feilden Article written by Tom Feilden Science correspondent, Today programme

Why species matter
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How many more fish in the sea? Plenty, according to research commissioned by the Census for Marine Life, which puts the number of species in the world's oceans at 2.2m, and the total for the whole planet at 8.74m (plus or minus 1.3m).

You can read more about the study, published in the journal PloS Biology, and the novel way that it was calculated here, but the figure is a vast improvement on previous estimates, which range form 3 to 100 million - close to useless when it comes to understanding the complex web of ecological interactions underpinning life on earth.

And the number of species we share the planet with does matter. As one of the co-author's of the study, Boris Worm from Dalhousie University points out,

"If we didn't know - even by an order of magnitude (1m? 10m? 100m?) - the number of people in a nation, how would we plan for the future?"

At its most basic, if we don't know what we've got, we can't protect it, and we can't even be sure what we're losing.

And we are losing species at an alarming rate. Again estimates vary wildly, but the distinguished biologist EO Wilson put the figure at some 30,000 a year, or three every hour. It's a rate that compares with previous extinction events - like the one that wiped out the dinosaurs 65m years ago - and has been dubbed the 6th mass extinction event in the history of life on earth.

Listening to the government's former chief scientific adviser, Lord May, on the programme this morning I was reminded of a scene in the science fiction blockbuster The Matrix.

Having subdued our hero the villain of the piece, agent Smith, pauses - as Hollywood bad guys so often do - to deliver a soliloquy: Humans, he declares, are like a virus, multiplying until every natural resource on the planet is consumed.

"Human beings are a disease. A cancer of this planet. You are a plague, and we are the cure."
Publicity still from the Matrix Can humanity avoid a species-depleted sci fi future?

Lord May didn't go quite that far, but he's not above employing the occasional sci fi metaphor to make his point.

Speaking some years ago as president of the Royal Society about the rate at which human activity was driving other species to extinction, he suggested that people were probably ingenious enough to survive in the damaged and depleted world of the movie Blade Runner, but the question was did we really want to live in that world?

"We are astonishingly ignorant," Lord May told the programme, "about how many species are alive on earth today, and even more ignorant about how many we can afford to lose while still maintaining the vital ecosystem services that humanity ultimately depends on."

That may be why so many biologists believe the biodiversity crisis is actually a much more profound threat to our future than global warming.
Tom Feilden Article written by Tom Feilden

[Scarikas]

I recall saying that it would be best if the Human Species was wiped out...

[SouthernStar]

I recall saying that it would be best if the Human Species was wiped out...

Better get started then :3

[Scarikas]

:D

[animalguy888]

I recall saying that it would be best if the Human Species was wiped out...

I am dissapointed that you had to say something like that. If humans die animals die and if animals die humans die. I ts human nature to make mistakes. I agree that animals are just as important as people,If they come into existance there must be some reason otherwise the universe would be pointless. Why have a vast space full of of amazing things when its not going to even do anything. Just because our mistakes our growing does not mean we should wish death upon our species,half of us did not even do anything wrong. Instead we should think of ways to fix our mistakes as just killing us all will not fix anything for then no one would be around to help. If everyone died becuase of a small percentage of human races mistakes whos going to try to fix it? No creature will be able to and the rest of the earth will die along with us.

[Quagga]

I wouldn't be so quick as to say that animals wouldn't be able to adapt without us. Animals have gone extinct in the past, and the ecosystem continues to hold up.

[Kenya]

Even humans are connected to the world-wide web. With ANY species dying, including us, things will die, things will adapt, and things will flourish. So please, even with humans suddenly disappearing, some species would die because of it, some species would adapt, and some would flourish. It doesn't mean the world would be better without us.

[Quagga]

Mmm, for the record, I was referring to

No creature will be able to and the rest of the earth will die along with us.

I have no doubt that some critters would die if we would cease to exist. From what I've heard... if domestic pigs are crossed with their wild counterpart, that crossed generation is most similar to the wild boar than the domestic pig, and so the domestic would be most easily out-bred than the wild/ferals. Then, there are others that would simply perish in other ways...

A recent thought - though yes, I don't believe in evolution, I'll still try to view it from that perspective, and it's still a thought all the same -
If you believe in evolution, and that things progressively evolve to become even greater and better suited for the ever-changing world... Then would you support trying to keep a dying species from going extinct? If they are dying, then obviously they are not best suited, best "evolved" for this world, and it would make room for the better, stronger species to exist.