There's a biodiversity crisis. Species are disappearing all over the Earth, and for a lot of different reasons: habitat loss, climate change, competition with invasive species, etc. No amount of protesting or political lobbying is going to stop this loss. What to do?
Most people would answer, "Save what we can." I agree, and I support all the biologists and others who are working to create more nature reserves, get better off-reserve conservation, reduce pollution, fight introduced species, etc etc.
But what about the losers? What about the species, communities and genetic variations that we're losing now, and will be losing in coming years?
An appropriate and responsible strategy is to salvage what we can as specimens for museums and herbaria, and as genetic material in genebanks. Biodiversity salvage of this kind has a couple of things going for it that some other conservation strategies don't. In the first place, all the necessary methods are already well-known and well-used, and the necessary infrastructure (museums, herbaria, genebanks) already exists.
Second, although salvagers might disagree on what needs salvaging first (which microbes, plants or animals), there's not much doubt about where to start salvaging. The places where biodiversity is vanishing fastest are obvious on a global scale on satellite images. On a local scale, prioritising salvage spots is very simple: go first to those habitats which are about to be destroyed, which are furthest from protected areas and which are furthest from previous biological sampling.
The aim of biodiversity salvage is not to create Noah's Arks. That's what reserves do, and zoos and botanical gardens. Biodiversity salvage is more like the archaeological surveys that are done in old cities before a new road or building is constructed. The aim is not to stop the development, but simply to recover some of the historical heritage before it’s destroyed. The aim of biodiversity salvage is not to stop the new farm, housing estate, industrial site or ocean outfall, but simply to recover some of Earth's natural heritage before it disappears.
It worries me that something this obvious has to be proposed as something new. I've struggled, though, to find earlier calls for salvage. The clearest one I know of comes from the Australian zoologist W. Baldwin Spencer, writing more than 80 years ago:
...the land and fresh-water fauna is disappearing rapidly, and unless we now make an organized effort it will be too late to study it effectually, and future generations will wonder what manner of people we were not to leave behind us some adequate record of the marvellously interesting forms of animal life which we had succeeded in exterminating...(p. 121)
Spencer, W.B. 1921. The necessity for an immediate and co-ordinated investigation into the land and fresh-water fauna of Australia and Tasmania. The Victorian Naturalist 37(10): 120-122.
Mesibov, R. 2004. Spare a thought for the losers. Australian Zoologist 32(4): 505-507.I can email a PDF copy on request.
1 comments:
That's one of the things one takes so for granted that it takes a while to realize how unusual one is in being concerned about it. It's not quite a publication on the subject, but in 1996 I wrote of Eastern Ontario Unionid mussels: "The recent introduction of Zebra Mussels (Dressena polymorpha) from Eurasia threatens to eliminate entire species and faunas of these magnificent bivalves by smothering and displacement. It behooves those of us who ought to have been documenting this fauna to get to work before these subtly lovely bivalves, our largest invertebrate animals, are gone from many habitats." (Schueler, Frederick W. 1996. A Survey of the Unionid mussels of the Rideau and lower Ottawa drainages. unpublished report to Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources, Peterborough, 92 pp.). I see I didn't quite say what I meant, which was "collect big samples of shells as each population goes extinct." Despite repeating this in public and private converstaions, nobody but me seems to have heeded this call (tomorrow we'll go out to pick up the shells of what was one of our most spectacular Unionid hotspots).... -- fws, Research Curator, Bishops Mills Natural History Centre, Bishops Mills, Ontario, Canada. bckcdb@istar.ca, http://pinicola.ca
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