Last week at volunteering someone said that the plants are coming into bloom earlier and earlier. There are reports, dating back to the 1980s.
Some plants and animals go by the length of daylight, which of course hasn't changed. If they get out of synch with the ones who are influenced by temperature, then various important partnerships break down. Plants bloom before the pollinators arrive, for example.
All this makes me very depressed.
There are other things where I think, does it matter?
Like if two owls or salamanders are adapted to the same niche but one out-performs the other, does it matter if one goes extinct? For ecosystem services, presumably no. But, the lost owl or salamander could have the genes that would enable the species to survive something as yet unforeseen. So, for genetic diversity, yes.
For the owls/salamanders themselves, well, they will all die... if you are the last of your species or one of a million, you still die. But it would impact you if you couldn't find a mate or if your culture was lost and you didn't know how to be the creature you were.
Say a Sumatran rhino in a zoo has a baby. The mother was born in a zoo. No one knows how to be anything but a rhino in a zoo. Actually, it's worse than this... I read about Suci when they were trying to get her pregnant again (she has had a calf, who was sent off to Sumatra, to a captive breeding place). Suci died since the book, The Sixth Extinction, was written.
Oh, now say the rhino was born and people could teach the rhino to be a rhino. All very good. But say that conditions have changed such that what you used to do as a rhino no longer works. Rhinos don't have to worry about predation, but say there was a new giant sabre-toothed cat that ate rhinos, now the people have to teach you not how to be a rhino but how to be a something else.... This is the situation for Australian mammals that didn't have to worry about cats and foxes in their evolutionary history. People have to create a new culture for these creatures... it's like the reverse of what happened with the fur foxes bred to be tame... they breed the most scared mammals, the least trusting ones.
These days, only the fastest evolvers stand a chance.
Comments