How we can make durians disappear - forever
Rosli OmarPublished: Jan 20, 2001 6:58 AM | Updated: Jan 29, 2008 6:21 PM
Dams not only drown lands and forests but they compound the injury all the more because they are usually built in pristine forest areas. These pristine forests harbour a high diversity in fauna and flora.
A high biodiversity reflects a healthy web of life, that interdependence between all forms of life in an environment. Living organisms, as a by-product of adaptation, is at risk from uniformity. A single susceptibility to a new disease will render the whole species vulnerable, risking a complete wipe-out. Mono-cultures are especially vulnerable. Plants or animals are better at survival if they have many different varieties. If one succumbed to some disease the others might be resistant. The importance of diversity is reflected in past disasters.
In 1845-46, a severe potato blight disease struck Ireland. The famine that followed killed over a million Irish and caused a million more to emigrate. Only two varieties of potatoes, both susceptible, were planted then.
Modern extensive agriculture, with increasing dependence on a few varieties, year round cropping, is particularly vulnerable. Pests are prone to increase in abundance because of the availability of vast fields of mono-cultured crops the whole year round. To keep away these pests, pesticides are heavily relied upon.
Professor Wilson of Harvard describes how during the 70s, the grassy-stunt virus devastated rice fields from India to Indonesia. Fortunately then, enough wild varieties of rice still existed. Out of 6,273 kinds of rice only one had the right resistance. It was bred with the prevailing cultivated rice to produce a resistant hybrid.
The same happen with the coffee rust disease that devastated coffee crops in Sri Lanka. It spread to Brazil and Central America in 1970. As in the rice episode, a wild coffee strain grown in Ethiopia (presumably the original home of coffee) was found in time that was resistant to the disease. It was successfully bred with the affected crops and saved them just in time.
A doubtful Malaysia Boleh record
Foremost in the causes of species extinction are habitat destruction followed by the invasion of introduced animals. According to the Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems (Page): Freshwater Systems report released by the [#1] World Resources Institute[/#] , much of the degradation of the world's freshwater systems is due to habitat destruction, the construction of dams and canals, introduction of non-native species, pollution, and over-exploitation.
Dams not only drown lands and forests but they compound the injury all the more because they are usually built in pristine forest areas. These pristine forests harbour a high diversity in fauna and flora.
A high biodiversity reflects a healthy web of life, that interdependence between all forms of life in an environment. Living organisms, as a by-product of adaptation, is at risk from uniformity. A single susceptibility to a new disease will render the whole species vulnerable, risking a complete wipe-out. Mono-cultures are especially vulnerable. Plants or animals are better at survival if they have many different varieties. If one succumbed to some disease the others might be resistant. The importance of diversity is reflected in past disasters.
In 1845-46, a severe potato blight disease struck Ireland. The famine that followed killed over a million Irish and caused a million more to emigrate. Only two varieties of potatoes, both susceptible, were planted then.
Modern extensive agriculture, with increasing dependence on a few varieties, year round cropping, is particularly vulnerable. Pests are prone to increase in abundance because of the availability of vast fields of mono-cultured crops the whole year round. To keep away these pests, pesticides are heavily relied upon.
Professor Wilson of Harvard describes how during the 70s, the grassy-stunt virus devastated rice fields from India to Indonesia. Fortunately then, enough wild varieties of rice still existed. Out of 6,273 kinds of rice only one had the right resistance. It was bred with the prevailing cultivated rice to produce a resistant hybrid.
The same happen with the coffee rust disease that devastated coffee crops in Sri Lanka. It spread to Brazil and Central America in 1970. As in the rice episode, a wild coffee strain grown in Ethiopia (presumably the original home of coffee) was found in time that was resistant to the disease. It was successfully bred with the affected crops and saved them just in time.
A doubtful Malaysia Boleh record
Foremost in the causes of species extinction are habitat destruction followed by the invasion of introduced animals. According to the Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems (Page): Freshwater Systems report released by the [#1]World Resources Institute[/#], much of the degradation of the world's freshwater systems is due to habitat destruction, the construction of dams and canals, introduction of non-native species, pollution, and over-exploitation.
The Red Data Book released by the [#2]International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN)[/#] states "Malaysia has by far the most threatened plant species - 681 - of which a large proportion are tropical timber trees. Indonesia, Brazil and Sri Lanka follow with 384, 338, and 280 threatened species respectively" - a Malaysia Boleh world record indeed.
According to Wilson, as a rule of thumb, a ten-fold increase in area results in a doubling of the number of species, but more importantly, reflecting present reality, a ten-fold decrease in area results in a halving of the number of species.
Web of life
When a particular species is extinct or limited in number, it can trigger other, often, unexpected consequences, quite unforeseen in the beginning. In North America and elsewhere, wolfs were regarded as pests, especially by farmers. They were hunted and killed in huge numbers to the point of extinction.
As a result, deer population exploded and ate away the vegetation, in competition with cattle, causing a lot of damage to the environment. The wolves were no longer there to provide a check to the deer population. The introduction of deers, and rabbits to lands without their natural predators again led to defoliation.
The wolf is a keystone species. The removal of a keystone species causes a substantial part of the community to change drastically. Many other species decline to near or total extinction or else rise to unprecedented numbers. A most potent example of this change is the case of the sea otter. They once thrived among the kelp beds close to shore from Alaska to southern California. It was so hunted for its fur such that it was close to extinction.
In places where they disappeared completely, an unexpected chain of events took place. Sea urchins, normally the major prey of the otters, exploded in numbers and began consuming large portions of the kelp and other inshore seaweeds. Large stretches of the sea floor became a desert-like terrain.
The importance of the kelp is that they host a community of lesser algal species, crustaceans, squid, fishes and other organisms. Gray whales come to park their young in breaks along the kelp edge while feeding on the animal plankton, made possible again by the kelp and its community. Without the kelp - because of the disappearance of the sea otters - this community, and biodiversity, are lost.
On the other hand, introduction of predators to an environment already stable in its ecosystem could lead to devastation of that system. The worst example is the case of the Nile perch which caused the most catastrophic extinction of recent history, that of the cichlid fishes of Lake Victoria. The perch was introduced to the lake by British colonialists in 1959. It proceeded to devastate the local fishes and extinguish some of cichlid species. It is projected to extinguish half of the endemics (species that occur only in one place and nowhere else in the world).
The disappearance of the cichlids caused an alga bloom, on which the cichlids feed. The plants that die drop to the lake bottom and decompose, thus depleting oxygen in the deeper water. The lack of oxygen accelerates the decline of the cichlids, crustaceans, and other life forms. As one biologist put it, "Never before has man in a single ill-advised step placed so many vertebrate species simultaneously at risk of extinction and also, in doing so, threatened a food resource and traditional way of life."
The impact due to species introduced to reservoirs - as what we have been doing to ours - either for angling purposes or to replenish species that are extinguished by the existence of dams, must be properly studied so that the Nile perch experience is not repeated here.
The top predator
But the worst case of damage to the world ecosystem must be due to its very top predator par excellence: us humans. We have already seen the impact of dam construction on fish and other populations ([#3]Rivers dammed are rivers damned[/#]).
Humans in their migration across the earth have eliminated one-fifth of the bird species. And of the remaining 9,040 species, 11 percent are endangered. In a search of exclusively Malaysian freshwater fish of lowland forest, only 122 species remain of the 266 originally.
The fungi of Western Europe appear to be in the midst of a massive extinction - some 40 to 50 percent of the species have been lost in the past 60 years. The main culprit is human created air pollution. Many of the lost species are mycorrhiza fungi. This is worrying. The fungi are the basis for the existence of life itself.
The symbiosis between the fungi and plant roots - where the fungi helps plants to absorb nutrients from the soil in return for food from the plants - is the basis for food source for animals, insects and other life forms. Ecologists have long wondered what would happen to land ecosystems if these fungi were removed. We will soon find out.
Malaysia is one of the 18 'hotspots' of the world - an area that contains both large numbers of endemic species and under extreme threat; their major habitats have been reduced to less than 10 percent of the original cover or are destined to that fate within one to several decades. The peninsular used to contain 8,500 species of plants, of which as many as a third were endemic.
By the 1980s half of the forest cover was gone. Almost all of the remaining lowland sector, the richest repository of biodiversity, had been degraded to some extent. About half of the endemic tree species are now endangered or extinct. Our tropical rainforests, the oldest in the world at 130 million years old, might soon be gone.
Cutting forests and resource depletion are due to growth in consumption, either as a result of population growth or increased affluence from development, or both. As an example of the affluence case, the US with about 5 percent of the world's population produces some 25 percent of the world's carbon dioxide, which is a measure of their manufacturing and thus consumption. We need sustainable consumption which entails sustainable development and population growth (and ultimately, no growth).
The extinction of species that follow the loss of their habitats is so serious that scientists are now talking of the "sixth extinction." In the history of the world there had been five major catastrophic extinctions of life on earth. The fifth was the demise of the dinosaurs. All the past five extinctions were from natural causes. The sixth, however, will be created - by humans wreaking havoc on the environment, bringing our own demise. Who can say we don't deserve our fate?
The treasures of biodiversity
On species extinction, Wilson asks, "Why should we care? What difference does it make if some species are extinguished, if even half of all species on earth disappear? Let me count the ways. New sources of scientific information will be lost. Vast potential biological wealth will be destroyed. Still undeveloped medicines, crops, pharmaceuticals, timber, fibers, pulp, soil-restoring vegetation, petroleum substitutes, and other products and amenities will not come to light.
"It is fashionable in some quarters to wave aside the small and obscure, the bugs and weeds, forgetting that an obscure moth from Latin America saved Australia's pastureland from overgrowth by cactus, that the rosy periwinkle provided the cure for Hodgkin's disease and childhood lymphocytic leukaemia, that the bark of the Pacific yew offers hope for victims of ovarian and breast cancer, that a chemical from the saliva of leeches dissolves blood clots during surgery... it is also easy to overlook the services that ecosystems provide humanity. They enrich the soil and create the very air that we breathe."
In the US, 25 percent of pharmaceutical prescriptions are derived from plants, 13 percent from micro-organisms, 3 percent from animals, i e, altogether 40 percent are derived from nature. Christopher Wiart of Universiti Malaya records over 100 medicinal plants in Southeast Asia.
In no uncertain terms Wilson says, if all insects and land-dwelling arthropods disappeared, humans would probably not last more than a few months. And, if the fruit bats are gone, some of our best durians will follow too.
Further reading
Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life. Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1994.
[#4]World Commission on Dams[/#], Dams and development: a new framework for decision making, November 2000.
DR ROSLI OMAR is an academic interested in the impact of science and technology on society and environment (being bred on the white heat of technology creed himself), be they dams, biotechnology/genetic engineering, or polluting machines. He believes that science and technology, as used at present, are sustaining an unsustainable development - the worst of all possible paradoxes.
A high biodiversity reflects a healthy web of life, that interdependence between all forms of life in an environment. Living organisms, as a by-product of adaptation, is at risk from uniformity. A single susceptibility to a new disease will render the whole species vulnerable, risking a complete wipe-out. Mono-cultures are especially vulnerable. Plants or animals are better at survival if they have many different varieties. If one succumbed to some disease the others might be resistant. The importance of diversity is reflected in past disasters.
In 1845-46, a severe potato blight disease struck Ireland. The famine that followed killed over a million Irish and caused a million more to emigrate. Only two varieties of potatoes, both susceptible, were planted then.
Modern extensive agriculture, with increasing dependence on a few varieties, year round cropping, is particularly vulnerable. Pests are prone to increase in abundance because of the availability of vast fields of mono-cultured crops the whole year round. To keep away these pests, pesticides are heavily relied upon.
Professor Wilson of Harvard describes how during the 70s, the grassy-stunt virus devastated rice fields from India to Indonesia. Fortunately then, enough wild varieties of rice still existed. Out of 6,273 kinds of rice only one had the right resistance. It was bred with the prevailing cultivated rice to produce a resistant hybrid.
The same happen with the coffee rust disease that devastated coffee crops in Sri Lanka. It spread to Brazil and Central America in 1970. As in the rice episode, a wild coffee strain grown in Ethiopia (presumably the original home of coffee) was found in time that was resistant to the disease. It was successfully bred with the affected crops and saved them just in time.
A doubtful Malaysia Boleh record
Foremost in the causes of species extinction are habitat destruction followed by the invasion of introduced animals. According to the Pilot Analysis of Global Ecosystems (Page): Freshwater Systems report released by the [#1]World Resources Institute[/#], much of the degradation of the world's freshwater systems is due to habitat destruction, the construction of dams and canals, introduction of non-native species, pollution, and over-exploitation.
The Red Data Book released by the [#2]International Union for Conservation of Nature and Natural Resources (IUCN)[/#] states "Malaysia has by far the most threatened plant species - 681 - of which a large proportion are tropical timber trees. Indonesia, Brazil and Sri Lanka follow with 384, 338, and 280 threatened species respectively" - a Malaysia Boleh world record indeed.
According to Wilson, as a rule of thumb, a ten-fold increase in area results in a doubling of the number of species, but more importantly, reflecting present reality, a ten-fold decrease in area results in a halving of the number of species.
Web of life
When a particular species is extinct or limited in number, it can trigger other, often, unexpected consequences, quite unforeseen in the beginning. In North America and elsewhere, wolfs were regarded as pests, especially by farmers. They were hunted and killed in huge numbers to the point of extinction.
As a result, deer population exploded and ate away the vegetation, in competition with cattle, causing a lot of damage to the environment. The wolves were no longer there to provide a check to the deer population. The introduction of deers, and rabbits to lands without their natural predators again led to defoliation.
The wolf is a keystone species. The removal of a keystone species causes a substantial part of the community to change drastically. Many other species decline to near or total extinction or else rise to unprecedented numbers. A most potent example of this change is the case of the sea otter. They once thrived among the kelp beds close to shore from Alaska to southern California. It was so hunted for its fur such that it was close to extinction.
In places where they disappeared completely, an unexpected chain of events took place. Sea urchins, normally the major prey of the otters, exploded in numbers and began consuming large portions of the kelp and other inshore seaweeds. Large stretches of the sea floor became a desert-like terrain.
The importance of the kelp is that they host a community of lesser algal species, crustaceans, squid, fishes and other organisms. Gray whales come to park their young in breaks along the kelp edge while feeding on the animal plankton, made possible again by the kelp and its community. Without the kelp - because of the disappearance of the sea otters - this community, and biodiversity, are lost.
On the other hand, introduction of predators to an environment already stable in its ecosystem could lead to devastation of that system. The worst example is the case of the Nile perch which caused the most catastrophic extinction of recent history, that of the cichlid fishes of Lake Victoria. The perch was introduced to the lake by British colonialists in 1959. It proceeded to devastate the local fishes and extinguish some of cichlid species. It is projected to extinguish half of the endemics (species that occur only in one place and nowhere else in the world).
The disappearance of the cichlids caused an alga bloom, on which the cichlids feed. The plants that die drop to the lake bottom and decompose, thus depleting oxygen in the deeper water. The lack of oxygen accelerates the decline of the cichlids, crustaceans, and other life forms. As one biologist put it, "Never before has man in a single ill-advised step placed so many vertebrate species simultaneously at risk of extinction and also, in doing so, threatened a food resource and traditional way of life."
The impact due to species introduced to reservoirs - as what we have been doing to ours - either for angling purposes or to replenish species that are extinguished by the existence of dams, must be properly studied so that the Nile perch experience is not repeated here.
The top predator
But the worst case of damage to the world ecosystem must be due to its very top predator par excellence: us humans. We have already seen the impact of dam construction on fish and other populations ([#3]Rivers dammed are rivers damned[/#]).
Humans in their migration across the earth have eliminated one-fifth of the bird species. And of the remaining 9,040 species, 11 percent are endangered. In a search of exclusively Malaysian freshwater fish of lowland forest, only 122 species remain of the 266 originally.
The fungi of Western Europe appear to be in the midst of a massive extinction - some 40 to 50 percent of the species have been lost in the past 60 years. The main culprit is human created air pollution. Many of the lost species are mycorrhiza fungi. This is worrying. The fungi are the basis for the existence of life itself.
The symbiosis between the fungi and plant roots - where the fungi helps plants to absorb nutrients from the soil in return for food from the plants - is the basis for food source for animals, insects and other life forms. Ecologists have long wondered what would happen to land ecosystems if these fungi were removed. We will soon find out.
Malaysia is one of the 18 'hotspots' of the world - an area that contains both large numbers of endemic species and under extreme threat; their major habitats have been reduced to less than 10 percent of the original cover or are destined to that fate within one to several decades. The peninsular used to contain 8,500 species of plants, of which as many as a third were endemic.
By the 1980s half of the forest cover was gone. Almost all of the remaining lowland sector, the richest repository of biodiversity, had been degraded to some extent. About half of the endemic tree species are now endangered or extinct. Our tropical rainforests, the oldest in the world at 130 million years old, might soon be gone.
The extinction of species that follow the loss of their habitats is so serious that scientists are now talking of the "sixth extinction." In the history of the world there had been five major catastrophic extinctions of life on earth. The fifth was the demise of the dinosaurs. All the past five extinctions were from natural causes. The sixth, however, will be created - by humans wreaking havoc on the environment, bringing our own demise. Who can say we don't deserve our fate?
The treasures of biodiversity
On species extinction, Wilson asks, "Why should we care? What difference does it make if some species are extinguished, if even half of all species on earth disappear? Let me count the ways. New sources of scientific information will be lost. Vast potential biological wealth will be destroyed. Still undeveloped medicines, crops, pharmaceuticals, timber, fibers, pulp, soil-restoring vegetation, petroleum substitutes, and other products and amenities will not come to light.
"It is fashionable in some quarters to wave aside the small and obscure, the bugs and weeds, forgetting that an obscure moth from Latin America saved Australia's pastureland from overgrowth by cactus, that the rosy periwinkle provided the cure for Hodgkin's disease and childhood lymphocytic leukaemia, that the bark of the Pacific yew offers hope for victims of ovarian and breast cancer, that a chemical from the saliva of leeches dissolves blood clots during surgery... it is also easy to overlook the services that ecosystems provide humanity. They enrich the soil and create the very air that we breathe."
In the US, 25 percent of pharmaceutical prescriptions are derived from plants, 13 percent from micro-organisms, 3 percent from animals, i e, altogether 40 percent are derived from nature. Christopher Wiart of Universiti Malaya records over 100 medicinal plants in Southeast Asia.
In no uncertain terms Wilson says, if all insects and land-dwelling arthropods disappeared, humans would probably not last more than a few months. And, if the fruit bats are gone, some of our best durians will follow too.
Further reading
Edward O. Wilson, The Diversity of Life. Penguin Books: Harmondsworth, 1994.
[#4]World Commission on Dams[/#], Dams and development: a new framework for decision making, November 2000.
DR ROSLI OMAR is an academic interested in the impact of science and technology on society and environment (being bred on the white heat of technology creed himself), be they dams, biotechnology/genetic engineering, or polluting machines. He believes that science and technology, as used at present, are sustaining an unsustainable development - the worst of all possible paradoxes.
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