Which Species Should We Save?

As you have probably heard, many species of animals are starting to become extinct. Rather than try to save every species that is beginning to die off, scientists in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences are now trying to decide which are the most crucial. These are the animals with the greatest genetic diversity, the team reported two weeks ago. Marc W. Cadotte, a researcher on the team, said, "Given that we are losing species from ecosystems around the world, we need to know which species matter the most -- and which we should pour our resources into protecting," . Taking one part out of an ecosystem may mean losing the whole ecosystem. For example, if all of the polar bears in an arctic ecosystem become extinct, the decomposers have no food. If there are no decomposers, the producers can't survive, and if producers can't survive, niether can herbivores. Once all the herbivores are gone, the carnivores die off, and the ecosystem is gone. So the scientists researching this have a really important decision to make- if they decide wrong, it can destroy many other ecosystems, ultimately leading to us- every ecosystem is ultimately linked together, called the biosphere. Scientists are saying that this is the second biggest extinction the world has seen, only to be beat by the extinction of the dinosaurs about 65million years ago. I am not sure how well this plan will work- every ecosystem in the world is connected via the biosphere, so it will ultimately affect us- I think it may be easier to save the most important parts of the ecosystem than to save every endangered species in the world.

Article by Yahoo! Green http://green.yahoo.com/news/livescience/20081021/sc_livescience/scientistsdeterminingwhichspeciestosave.html