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Who needs bats? We hardly ever see the pesky creatures. They surface here and there, flitting ominously out of half-forgotten old attics, terrorizing good, honest folks who just want to find that old stack of 1950's photo albums. They're a nuisance. So, who needs 'em?...Well,we do. In one night of foraging one bat can capture a thousand mosquitoes. With the advance of climate change, bats and other mosquito-eaters will come in handy to curb the inva­sion of tropical diseases into northerly regions. Something to con­sider as a mysterious disease, first discovered in New York State, is killing thousands of bats and is moving westward.
cal jungles, scour the globe for the last pools of oil and remove mountain tops or sage plains to turn coal into greenhouse gases.
We know that we will be more susceptible now, as those tropical diseases advance toward our "civilized" northern countries. We know that factory ships—which can catch species of fish that were "in the old days" simply thrown back as bycatch—are destroying the ocean populations. Many medium size fish species take several
So, who needs black-footed ferrets?
years to reach reproduc­tive status, and, as fac­tory ships ravage the ex­isting populations, their reproductive capacity goes steadily downward. This is one of the many subtleties of ecosystems we choose to ignore—the interlocking of reproduc­tive capacities.
When we Europeans arrived in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen­turies on the land mass now known as the Unit­ed States, Canada and
It's a seemingly insur­mountable struggle for us wilderness and ecosys­tem-lovers to convince our fellow citizens that an impoverished ecosystem is a threat to their very existence. Yet, while we remain blinded in scien­tific ignorance, the sky is falling. We still are not aware of the far-reach­ing effects the extinction of a species like black-
footed ferret could have on us humans. How about blue whales? The largest animals we have ever known, the mammals can reach up to 150 tons; they are baleen whales, feeding on tiny organ­isms that they strain from sea water. After decades of whaling, the species is dying out, and, again, we do not invest enough in zoological field studies to begin to know whether the extinction of blue whales will make any difference to humanity. We can't say precisely how our acidification of the ocean, and the changes we have wrought in species composition, have impacted the feeding patterns of the great mammals, or worsened the conditions of the already depleted population.
Mexico, the seas were alive with all sorts of fishes and other forms of life, all carrying out their respective roles in ecosystems, some seemingly trivial, some very important. The riches of the oceans and the land were astonishing. But, since our arrival, we have disrupted those balances. Today the oceans are being acidified, a byproduct of global warming; coral reefs are disappearing, taking with them the many forms of life that based their lives on corals. Today a few hundred thousand buffalo persist on protected lands, the last remnants of huge thundering herds that thrived on the bunch grasses—perennials—the dominant vegetative cover of the Great Plains. Without those protected areas, the buffalo could not survive on the modern plains, which have been ploughed under with crops like corn and wheat and the other grains—annuals— and lie barren, open to the ravages of wind and rain, after each yearly harvest.
Remember that a huge proportion of species now with us are al­ready on the endangered list. Yet we continue to chop down tropi-
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