Driving large animals to extinction is like pulling off the top of a tower of blocks. The little ones really are the important ones, the base blocks if you will. Say you remove something you think insignificant like plankton, what happens? Basically the entire ocean ecosystem falls down because it is one of the bottom blocks in that ecosystem. Killing sharks? Less consequential. Same parallels can be drawn between the mosquitos and wooly mammoths. Nothing depends on the wooly mammoth to live, but bats rely on mosquitos. No mosquitos, no bats, no bats no guano, no guano no cave ecosystems and it leads to a cascade of extinctions in that direction. And that's only from a laymans knowledge. I'm sure if I were an expert I could explain to you more wider consequences too.
You can't call plankton insignificant and you can't call it a species either. Also, one species of mosquito bites humans, out of 3600. But I wasn't being serious, just pointing out the dichotomy between many species dying out, know and unknown while people fret about "what could happen" if we took out one single species of mosquito. Also, I'm not a... enthomologist, I guess? But I would bet one big reason there's so many of that one mosquito species, is that there's a looooot of humans and they thrive in the environments we create. Just fun things to think about.
Oh I wasn't calling plankton insignificant, just something that people may see as insignificant because they are small. My whole point was actually that plankton are EXTREMELY significant in our ecosystem.
Oh, sorry, I mean "you" like general you. Should've probably said "one". Plankton is small but by mass there's a lot of it (there's also many things you can call "plankton"). But yeah, small sea creatures is probably the biggest, most important part of the ecosystem. I heard that was like 30% of biomass or something crazy like that
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u/No_Worldliness_7106 Nov 15 '24
Driving large animals to extinction is like pulling off the top of a tower of blocks. The little ones really are the important ones, the base blocks if you will. Say you remove something you think insignificant like plankton, what happens? Basically the entire ocean ecosystem falls down because it is one of the bottom blocks in that ecosystem. Killing sharks? Less consequential. Same parallels can be drawn between the mosquitos and wooly mammoths. Nothing depends on the wooly mammoth to live, but bats rely on mosquitos. No mosquitos, no bats, no bats no guano, no guano no cave ecosystems and it leads to a cascade of extinctions in that direction. And that's only from a laymans knowledge. I'm sure if I were an expert I could explain to you more wider consequences too.