Back, and thoughts

Hey all, I'm back...I realize I left everyone hanging about my western Conference NBA preview (MAVSMAVSMAVSMAVSMAVS), but I'm sure you can wait a while longer.

What follows is a response to an email I recieved. I'll post the original email (in some kind of quotation) and then my reply. Hope you enjoy, I think the topic is relevant and useful for anyone in the sciences.

EXTINCTION EXAMPLE

While talking about the amphibian extinction crisis
at the National Science
Teachers Associations annual conference, I was asked
a question that I had no
real answer for and I now solicit your help.

Can anyone provide an example of one species (of any animal) that,
because
ithas gone extinct, has caused specific, direct, consequences to
humankind.

The answer to this question should not have the words
(could have, might
have,or should have) in it.

Examples:I know that
we "might have" learned a lot from the Gastric
Brooding Frog, butbecause it
is now extinct, has humankind really directly
suffered? Has the ecological
balance been thrown so far out of whack in
the area that the animal was from
that it became inhospitable for humans to live
there? Have people lost their
jobs and died because of such
extinction?

Or the Passenger Pigeon.
Are we as a people now suffering
because we caused its extinction?

Or Steller's Sea Cow. We killed it. Did it really change the big picture
of
human existence?

I just need one example. Thanks for your time.

I've got your answer in three parts:

1. We could answer this question directly. The best known example ofspecies extinctions is the dodo. While some people have speculated that the name dodo is a derogatory reference to the poor taste of its flesh, sailors utilized the bird as a food source. Hence the loss ofthe bird from the island meant that sailors no longer had access to that particular food source, which was unafraid of man and generally an easy mark. The bird was replaced by pigs/rats/cats on
these islands, all of which were much more difficult to capture and generally required guns/ammunition. As a result: Increased cost to humans. A specific, direct, consequence to humankind. There are many similar examples.

2. A better answer to this question would be to refer to 'functional'extinction. For example, the American chestnut tree. The American chestnut tree once comprised over 30% of the Eastern forests of the United States. The wood of the chestnut tree contains a high amount of
tannins, making it resistant to decay, and therefore useful in a variety of applications. In addition, many families made their living by harvesting the chestnuts from mountainous groves, roasting them, and selling them throughout the year. In 1904 (?) someone at theBronx Zoo noticed a fungus growing on the chestnut trees there, and by 1950 practically every large American chestnut tree in the Eastern U.S. was dead. The entire industry devoted to these
trees collapsed overnight. However, you couldn't quite call the American chestnut extint. The fungus usually does not attack until they are greater than six feet tall, and so the long-established seed-bank throughout the former range of this species continues to push up young plants that never survive longer than a decade. In addition, clever individuals realized that
they could plant the trees far outside the original range of the fungal blight (e.g., Oregon), and they still persist there today. However, the industry that once thrived on this beautiful tree is now almost completely gone. The original question referred to "lost jobs and died"...this is certainly the case in many cases of 'functional' extinction. Other examples include: Newfoundland cod, African cichlids, and various whale species. Yet few of those species are completely extinct. There just aren't enough of them left to do anything useful.

3. I suspect the intent of this question was to highlight the unimportance of species extinctions (and I hope I've at least given some examples of those costs), but I suspect the counter-argument to my examples would be made that none of those extinctions or'functional' extinctions have affected humankind as a whole. In fact the original question stated: "Did it really change the big picture of human existence?" One can certainly point to the resource replacement idea: Well, we lost the dodo, so we released pigs on the island and started
shooting them. Well, we lost the American chestnut and so we started importing European chestnuts. This is why I think this whole question is stupid. For example, if chestnut blight evolved a little and wiped out the European chestnut tree (I don't think Asian chestnuts are edible), then we've lost all our chestnut supply, permanently. In that case, the loss of the
European chestnut tree would have been more important than the loss of the
American chestnut tree, solely because of the order in which the extinctions occurred. The costs of biodiversity loss are not always felt until we start to lose redundancy, but that doesn't mean that it is only the last species lost that was important.

I guess ultimately the biggest question that this email raised in my mind was: What would a change in the big picture of human existence look like? Would it look like the shift from
hunter-gatherer societyto agrarian society? Wasn't that change driven by the extinction of large game animals (partly due to overpredation by the increasing human population)? Or would it look like a shift in the economic fortunes of particular areas?

My 13-hour car ride thoughts...