Humankind
with a high form of intelligence are a highly adaptive
living creatures and
can exist in almost any extreme
environment through improvisation. We were able to perfect
hunting, fishing, and farming for eons of years. We are
able to create better machines, better houses and better
vehicles to go places. Due to advances in medical knowledge,
we are able to cure diseases, prolong life and facilitate
child-bearing with ease. But we also learned how to destroy
our environment in a rapid pace to accommodate the rapid
explosion of human population, leading to degradation
of other animals’ wildlife habitat.
Let’s check this diagram
to better understand the complex interaction of the living
things on earth.
To
enlarge, click on picture
Man
is in the center of this food chain. We are omnivores
-- we eat almost anything! Since we are in the middle
of it, we are very much affected. Pesticides that
we dumped on these lower levels we get to consume
it. For example vegetables, oysters and fish respectively
absorb and ingest a small amount of these
chemicals not enough to kill them. Lets assign a
value as an example - 1 mg for each of these living
things. A person eats 100 oysters, i.e. 100 oysters
x 1mg = 100mg that will be in the body of that person.
This process is called Biological magnification.
The amount ingested by the person might not be enough
to kill him at that time. But consider the effects
in the long run as long as this person lives.
If
you break a part of this food chain, some organisms
will either adapt to their new environment or the
worst scenario
is they become extinct. Once extinct, the process cannot
be undone! Forests, shrubbery and swamps contain a lot
of other types of organisms-from bacteria to birds
and other
large herbivores- deers, horses, cows and predators
such as panthers. This is the reason why we have
to preserve as
much natural habitat and avoid rampant destruction of
the environment.
Ant-eaters
eat termites and ants. How many of us have seen ant-eaters?
These animals are
getting extinct due to again
-human encroachment- while termites and ants proliferate
everywhere even with tons of pesticide we dump on their
nests! Some viruses change and mutate, making them
harder to get
rid of. Crows, pigeons and other birds adapt to our way
of life by foraging on our garbage such as left over
french
fries and burgers. There are times that raccoons and
stray dogs would pick up garbage and eat the styrofoam
plates
and eat it thinking it is food. Basically eating
anything just
to survive. They forget to hunt as there is nothing to
hunt! And why hunt when we easily give them the food – junk
food that shorten their life. They have no choice! Mosquitoes
and other pests abound in several areas as their natural
predators disappear! We dump more pesticide and they
become resistant to it.
Other forms of life just cannot adapt easily. Soon we might
not be able to see any deer in Florida due to human encroachment.
Sea turtles mistake plastic bags floating
on the sea as jellyfish –their natural food.
They eat these plastic bags and die of indigestion!
Same as with crested Caracara - birds
of prey. But where does their prey comes from – the
forest, the shrubberies, etc. They eat snakes, turtles
and carrion. But they prefer
live ones! What do snakes and turtles eat? Snakes eat
rodents, most small animals, even birds and earthworms.
These earthworms
contribute to the fertility of the soil, where we grow
our trees and vegetables, where we put our horses
and cows for
grazing. The horses and cows excrete dung-which gets
eaten by beetles etc, decay and makes our soil fertile.
So it is
a cycle. If we do not have the other forms of living
things down at the bottom of the chain, the ones
on the top will
start dying! Trees and plants help prevent flooding and
hold water down for our water supply.
But man, even with its intelligence, has forgotten this
cycle. We have perfected fishing and we almost drove some
species to extinction. We have perfected our hunting ability
so that we can easily shoot animals a mile away. We also
perfected our equipment that we can easily extract anything
from earth, flatten mountains and fill it with houses.
Human
presence with the noise they create –from machinery,
explosions, to cars, to loud boom boxes, scare these
wildlife away. Some seek new places to nest away
from the disturbances,
others die from starvation and never get replaced by
new generations, while pests abound.
