"World in Pieces"



The Song of the Dodo

 

In his closing chapter of the book Quammen brings the main theme of his book back around, reminding us that these questions that had been formed to study the biology of islands now apply to mainlands as well, where ecosystems are being divided into virtual islands by human activity. He uses the example of Carl Jones and the Mauritius kestrel. Even though initial efforts to save the bird were shut down Jones persisted and essentially saved the species from extinction. Quammen includes several other efforts similar to this that started out rather rocky but were essentially successful.

He then switches gears in order to end his book on a hopeful note. He tells the story of how he went to the island of Aru where Alfred Wallace had done his main research. He went to look for the colorful bird of paradise that Wallace had described over a century before. He closes with the idea that despite the signs of human activity, even on Aru, the magnificent bird survives.

 

I think out of this whole final reading the last sentiment is my favorite part. During chapters in the rest of the book it was a lot of doom and gloom and talk of extinction and endangerment but there were very few moments that made you truly hopeful such as this. There were parts in this book where I almost felt hopeless, like there really is nothing that I could do to save some of these species, but in this last happy moment he gives us hope for humanity and for the beauty in the world. I'm happy that he ended with this so as not to leave a sour taste in our mouths but to leave a feeling of joy and hopefulness.

 

 

The Ross Ice Shelf

A few semesters ago I took an EES course which was focused mainly on Arctic and Antarctic regions of the globe and I remember learning about the Ross Ice Shelf and why it is a very important area for various native species and I thought this might be an interesting variation to my usual blog posts. I went back through some old notes and dug up some new research and this is what I came up with.

 

The Ross Ice Shelf is crucial to penguins and their breeding cycles as well as to other organisms such as krill. Although the shelf’s position appears to be almost stationary, it actually undergoes continual change by calving and melting that go along with northward movement of the shelf ice. Upsetting this ice shelf upsets the balance of the Antarctic food web.

 

The shelf had significance for early explorers because its even ground allowed them to set up a base camp and then travel from there. 3.5 million years ago the Ross Ice Shelf was completely submerged under water, thus disappearing entirely. Predictions of future collapse of the ice sheet in response to global warming must take into account its past history. Scientists believe that this is likely to happen again or that the ice shelf may break off entirely.

 

Today the ice shelf regularly sheds large chunks of ice which turn into some of the largest icebergs in the Antarctic Ocean. If we believe current predictions about that ice shelf then the ice shelf may have very serious effects on the entire world in the future. Melting on the bottom of the ice shelf also occurs, and oceanographic data suggest that the net effect is the dissolution of the ice shelf by about 47–87 inches (120–220 cm) per year. If the ice shelf were to melt the sea level would rise significantly and it may even submerge other smaller ice shelves as well as some glaciers. This would mean a loss of wildlife because these ice shelves currently provide a place for many different species to live and breed.

 

The Ross Ice Shelf is extremely important to Antarctica as well as the world. Its existence plays an important role in the development of the wildlife and ecosystems, directing ocean currents as well as in climate change. The changes occurring in the ice shelf should not be taken lightly because they effect more than they appear to.

 

 

"The Hedgehog of the Amazon"

Song of the Dodo

The theory that one large reserve would support more species than several small ones was challenged in a paper by Dan Simberloff and Lawrence Abele published in 1976.
Abele studied heads of coral that supported small contained ecosystems and found through his observations that two small coral heads supported more species than one large one of equal area. In their paper they proposed that competition, the dispersal ability of species and the number of species might all contribute to natural situations where smaller areas might support more species than larger ones.

In order to test this Thomas Lovejoy, a program director for the World Wildlife Fund, convinced Brazilian ranchers who were clearing rainforest to leave square reserves of rainforest standing in determined sizes. These "islands" of rainforest were then studied, and the species counted to see if an ideal size could be determined. No hard conclusions could be reached but they did notice that the smallest of the reserves had fairly quickly unraveled, unable to support their former populations.

With these conclusions it would seem that the observations made by Abele about the coral reefs were possibly just an anomaly. I do not have any personal experience with this matter, naturally, but as far as common sense goes I think I would tend to agree with the idea that one larger reserve or area of land would be able to hold far more species than two smaller ones. Perhaps it is also possible that there are different rules for different types of ecosystems. For example, maybe Simberloff and Abele's theory would be correct for underwater ecosystems but not for forest ecosystems. I think much further exploration into this idea would need to occur before any hard conclusions could be drawn.

 
  

Effects of Pesticides continued..

There have been many studies conducted on the effects of pesticides, however, most of the test subjects have been insects and amphibians due to the obvious issues with testing these chemicals on humans. Without testing on human subjects it is hard for scientists to provide concrete proof as to the immediate effects that these chemicals have on the human body, but then the question can be raised that asks if these toxins are causing mass deaths among other living organisms on our planet what in fact are they doing to our bodies?

 

You wouldn't go into your kitchen cabinet and spray bug spray onto your family’s dinner, but spraying crops with pesticides is essentially doing just that. The EPA has the right to deem what is and what is not considered to be at a level that is too harmful to the human body to be able to be used on our food, but what is it exactly that makes something able to be deemed too harmful?

 

Through observational studies certain pesticides have been linked to the cause of certain short term illnesses and those that last long term as well. When people hear the word pesticides they generally think of some form of cancer, believing that this is the only thing that ingesting pesticides may lead to. However, they have been shown to aid in a plethora of disorders including damaging effects on the endocrine system, autism and ADHD, cancer, as well as problems of the eye, liver, kidneys and spleen, and cardiovascular, stomach and intestinal problems.

 

These problems can be seen in someone who has not even ingested these pesticides. Mere exposure to these chemicals can be enough to have them cause irreversible damage to your health.

 

 

"The Effects of Herbicides & Pesticides on Humans." LIVESTRONG.COM. Web. 22 Mar. 2012. <http://www.livestrong.com/article/246750-the-effects-of-herbicides-pesticides-on-humans/>.

 

 

Effects of Pesticide Imidacloprid

This seems to be a trend in some of my blog posts but it is an idea that I really am interested in and I figured having a relatively cohesive theme to a few of my posts might not be such a bad thing.

In this article that I found it discusses how the pesticide imidacloprid, which is actually considered to be a neurotoxin, is used to kill aphids on plants. This toxin most widely effects drinking water but the relevance of this article is simply to show some of the effects of what pesticides can do to the body in general.

Recently this chemical has been linked to “colony collapse disorder” which basically means that it is making entire colonies of our honeybees disappear. The reason that it does this so rapidly and effectively is because it is highly efficient at going from the soil to the plants pollen and nectar supplies. If it is toxic to bees at very low levels so how can this be good for humans?

The article also talks about how this chemical has a half life of six months, which means that it will not merely die out or dissipate quickly. The focus is mainly on how this particular pesticide effects honeybees, but if is effects honeybees there is a good chance that it will effect us as well. We are all living organisms. There is nothing different about the plants that honeybees are interacting with and the fruits and vegetables that we as humans are eating and utilizing on a daily basis. Although it would obviously take a much higher dosage of this chemical to effect us that it would a honeybee it still does not seem like a good idea to be ingesting something that is basically a poison.

I found this article interesting because in the long run it helps to determine why pesticides are inherently bad for our health, what some of the  main concerns are and eventually why it is worth it to buy organic food which contains no pesticides.

http://infoweb.newsbank.com/iw-search/we/InfoWeb?p_product=NewsBank&p_theme=aggregated5&p_action=doc&p_docid=13CB8F69DFB37E68&p_docnum=1&p_queryname=1

"Preston's Bell" - "The Coming Thing"

 

The relationship between the total area of an ecological system and the number of species it is able to support is an idea that has been looked at for many years, Quammen explains in this first chapter and many different conclusions have been drawn from it. In relation to the idea of island biogeography the simplest explanation of the relationship is that the larger the island, the more species it can support.

 

A biologist named Philip Darlington supported the theory that multiplying the area times ten apparently doubled the number of species that an ecosystem could support. The title of the chapter "Preston's Bell" comes from another researcher named Frank Preston who made similar observations, and also made observations on the distribution of species within islands. Preston noted that by plotting species in a graph based on their relative commonness, it created a bell curve. So essentially in any ecological system there are a few species that are very rare, many species that are somewhat common, and a few that are very common. Preston also observed that the few most common species made up the bulk of the actual individual animals.

 

I think this part of the reading fascinated  me the most because it shows how two researchers can observe the same kind of environment with the same information to offer and both come back with entirely different, yet relevant sets of information and theories.