Blue bee feared to be extinct is found in Florida(smithsonianmag.com) |
Blue bee feared to be extinct is found in Florida(smithsonianmag.com) |
Also liked and would recommend very highly Peter Wohlleben's The Hidden Life of Trees (so many new things to know).
Leaving this comment here just in case someone is interested.
The excellent youtube channel The Brain Scoop (from the field museum in Chicago) has a nice video explaining the basics. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9fOfFlMe6ek
I haven't read it, but you should be aware that his theses are highly controversial in expert circles.
Oddly enough they're solitary, rather than living in hives.
https://explorer.natureserve.org/Taxon/ELEMENT_GLOBAL.2.8725...
We should not think that a 6 month shutdown will undo all atrocities of man or nature
Someone just pulled off this same effect with Chocolate a while back. [1] (NTY paywall]
[1](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/21/science/chocolate-irisdes...)
Turns out people aren't interested in actually eating it. They assume there's some weird coating.
I guess, for now best way we have is just a simple preservation, within nature reserves.
One thing to realize is there are significant numbers of species that have such complex ecological dependencies that we don't know how to keep them alive outside of their natural habitat anyway, even if we could manufacture them from scratch. I've worked in labs studying mycorrhizal fungi, parasitic and mycoheterotrophic plants, soil protists, rare insects... Often, even if the species is well-characterized and we have plenty of living samples, the life-cycle still cannot be completed and a viable population cannot be maintained in artificial conditions.
Environmental genomic sampling is relatively easy to do, trendy, easy to get funding for. Conservation biology produces vast amounts of this data. But it mostly serves as an "ark" in terms of individual genes, gene products, limited gene networks, not the integrated individual. We've got very good at collating and maintaining vast databases of this stuff and very bad at stopping the actual biodiversity getting destroyed. Research on "how actually do we keep more species alive in the first place" does not get enough money or attention.
The happy news is that we're not nearly so powerful, as a species, as we fantasize ourselves to be. No more than a million or so years after we're gone, you'd never be able to tell by looking that we were here at all.
Science is many things, and one of them is a not very clever child endlessly sticking a penny in a light socket and endlessly being surprised at the unpleasant result. The trouble is that we all participate in the unpleasant result.
"How many species? The estimates I made in 1986 and cited in The Diversity of Life (1992) put the number of recognized living species in the world— in other words, those formally described and bearing two-part scientific names— at approximately 1.4 million.
About 13,000 additional “new” species are recognized each year. Thus in the decade since 1986 more than 100,000 species have been added, bringing the total as I counted it to 1.5 million. Meanwhile, the numbers in some important groups have been revised upward— in particular in the insects, the largest of all groups, from 751,000 in the 1980s to 865,000 in 1998. A similar elevation has been made for the fungi, from 47,000 to 69,000 species. A commonly cited total world figure in the late 1990s, suggested for example in the Global Biodiversity Assessment of the United Nations Environment Programme (1995), is 1.75 million species. But this does not take into account the number of formal species names that have been erroneously applied to species named by earlier investigators, requiring an eventual reduction of the global number by 10 or even 20 percent...
“Working figures” for all groups, including insects, have tended to fall close to 10 million; the Global Biodiversity Assessment number, which constitutes no more than an educated guess and leans to conservative sentiment, is 13,620,000."
As an analogy, if you knew the top 10% keystone chemicals that make up the human body but did not know the long tail of the other 90%, you'd likely miss out on a lot of the details that make it all work like immune system cells and vitamins. Just because a molecule (or species) is rare does not make it non-essential.
Could you explain? Dow we know of all the viruses/ bacteria/ trees/ insects that 'matter'?
Not true, unless you mean that humans only harvest the honey of two species.