Not-so-cuddly vultures can teach lesson in conservation
We cannot save all animals from extinction, so what is the best use of our conservation efforts? Should we be saving the cutest animals first?
A study of vultures in India suggests that we have a lot to learn.
Since the early 1990s, farmers in the country have been giving their cattle an anti-inflammatory pain medicine called Diclofenac to help the animals cope with arthritis and other inflammatory conditions. Because cows in India are used for dairy and not beef, lots of them end up dying in the field.
A group of vultures can efficiently strip a cow carcass to the bone in 40 minutes, but the birds are highly sensitive to Diclofenac. After ingesting the drug from the carcasses, up to 90% of them died from acute renal failure. This left their scavenging job to less efficient dogs and rats. The decaying carcasses led to pollution of waterways and to human disease carried by the canines and rodents.
Between 2000 and 2005, half a million people died as a result.
If losing one larger species can lead to this unexpected bad result, what can we anticipate if we lose several microscopic ones that we know are vital to human survival?
Hundreds of millions of species live in soil, but the loss of several dozen particular ones could dramatically alter its bioactivity for growing crops, leading to mass starvation.
Similarly, thousands of species of mostly single-cell plants in the ocean called phytoplankton are the first step in the ocean’s food chain. Critical to their growth and survival is a physical process affected by human activity.
In the arctic, ice is created from the freshwater portion of sea water, so the surrounding ocean becomes saltier and more dense. As it sinks, it drives something called the thermohaline conveyor that moves 100 times as much water as the Amazon River throughout the oceans of the world.
The conveyor creates the specific temperature, salinity, and micronutrient mix to grow the phytoplankton. If it is disrupted by the loss of formation of sea ice or the influx of too much fresh water from melting glaciers or from the thermal expansion of water, it could ultimately cause mass extinction in the ocean.
Protecting biodiversity is a big job, but one that we are compelled to engage in. As more of us realize that we don’t have a legitimate choice in the matter, we will continue to devote more money and effort to preserving habitat even if the plants we save are invisible and the animals are not so cute.
William Culbert is an Oak Ridge resident and retired physician.
This article originally appeared on Knoxville News Sentinel: How loss of vultures in India spawned diseases killing half a million
