|
Inebriate of air am I, And debauchee of dew, Reeling through endless summer days, From inns of molten blue. - Emily Dickinson
|
Narena writes an environment/natural history column for two New Zealand newspapers, the Bay of Plenty Times and the Opotiki News. She is a member of the East Coast/Hawkes Bay Conservation Board. She lives near Ohiwa Harbour in the Bay of Plenty, one of the best bird watching sites in New Zealand.
|
|
|
|
|
|
BIODIVERSITY
High Summer and everything intent upon breeding and increasing their numbers. Bugs everwhere! The "summer" flies intent upon taking the food before it reaches my mouth. The Mason wasps or mud daubers loudly building their nests, not only under the chairs but also in the folds of the drapes, while spiders threaten to totally envelope the cottage with their webs. In the evening, if I dare leave the windows open, I am bombarbed by moths and click and Huhu beetles.
But then there are the georgeous and exotic creatures which stop me in my tracks and disipate any hostility to the pestiferous. They send me off to the books to try and make an identification. Steely blue lady birds which I can always find in the lime tree, a tiny native bee in the hay paddocks which I have yet to identify and a strange creature I always find in the Corokia shrubs. Green and yellow with a touch of white and with two "horns", at first glance it looks like a beetle but when disturbed it reveals itself to be a spider. I gather it is an Australian import. The wisteria vine is utterly infested with another strange creature with a tuft of whitish hairs at the end of their bodies. The children call them "fluffy bums" and when touched jump a considerable distance to escape. They are the larvae of another Australian interloper, the green plant hopper.
Why this desire, this compunction, a friend asks, to name things? Why the need to identify them, know who they are?
To show respect, is my response.
How many species are there in the world today? Most estimates fall between ten and 100 million. It is indeed remarkable that we in this modern world do not know to within an order of magnitude how many species we share this planet with, says Richard Leakey in his book The Sixth Extinction.
We have a good estimate of how many stars are in our galaxy. We know how many nucleotide bases constitute the human genetic blueprint and we can calculate to within a few hours when a comet will collide with Jupiter yet we cannot put a secure number on current species diversity. It is not through lack of knowing but through a lack of commitment. Governments hav spent hundreds of milions of dollars on the systemtatic study of stars but only a tiny fraction of that sum on the systematic study of nature here on Earth.
Of the estimates of the ten to 100 million species that may exist on this planet only about 1.4 million have been recorded and identified. Even here in New Zealand, the vast majority of species are unnamed and unknown. However, if we did make the commitment to "aim at nothing less that a full count, a complete catalogue of life on Earth", as Edward O. Wilson urges, we woulld fail, as species are becoming extinct at an alraming rate. It is estimated that half the species will become extinct by the middle of next century.
Howver, there have been at least five occasions in the very long history of the planet where as many as two thirds of its living creatures disappeared from the face of the earth. The end-Permian extinction, 225 million years ago, extirpated more than 95 per cent of marine animal species amd almost as many on land. Virtually all scientists who are studying biological diversity agree that we are now in the midst of the sixth great extinction crisis, this time precipitated entirely by man, Homo sapiens sapiens.
The sad fact of our history is that no matter where we have gone, destruction and extinction of species has followed. When primitive man crossed the Bering Straits into North America, destruction of all the great herbivores, the mega fauna, followed. The movement of out species into the Pacific Islands, Australia and New Zealand was also followed by mass extinctions, in our case the great flightless birds, the Moas. European expansion in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries merely accelerated the process.
With the continuing destruction of habitat in the face of the industrial and agricultural expansion, both of which are aspects of continued population growth, the process of species extinction in the twentieth century as accelerated even nmore, to the point where our own future may well be threatened.
We have a moral duty to know "the endless forms most beautiful", as Darwin said, with which we share this earth.
It has become ny credo, for once identified, once known and named, one cannot easily deny a creature's existence, cannot so easily destroy them.
end
|
|
|
|
