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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: TimF who wrote (138702)	8/10/2001 11:53:43 AM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 1576357

"I do believe the whales absence will have almost no direct impact on us except the psychological." Maybe, maybe not. In general, a simplified ecology is not very stable, it requires a lot of intervention to keep it going. A saltwater aquarium is an excellent example, without the pumps, filters, heaters and chemicals that are added, a saltwater aquarium quickly becomes a dead, smelly mess. Another example. In much of the US the larger predators have been eliminated. In areas that have large wooded areas, deer and other normally prey animals become a nuisance if humans don't step in to thin the numbers. Even then, since humans like to kill the strong and healthy and leave the weak and the sick, it has interesting implications for their future... Whales are an important part of the marine ecosystem. One critical, irreplaceable function they serve is at their death. When that large amount of protein sinks to the bottom, they feed a lot of the bottom dwellers. When the flesh is gone, the bones are colonized by animals that normally inhabit the benthic vents. It is quite likely that whales bones are crucial for the vent colonizers by providing waypoints for the creatures. In this way the bones are the stepping stones from one vent to another as the vents are created and destroyed. Now true, there were vent colonizers way before there were whales, but they likely don't colonize by the same mechanisms as they did those millions of years ago. So if the whales were to disappear, the vent communities would be impacted. So what? What do the vent colonies do for people in the here and now? The only answer is, who knows? No direct impact, but with complex systems, there is inherently no way to predict what, if any, disruption or impact a single change will have. In general, a single change has little or no impact, but with chaotic systems there is no way to predict it. As a result, wiping out the inhabitants of a particular niche, like large whales, is something that should be avoided at all costs. Any given species shouldn't be a big deal, but a whole class is...