Wildlife, biodiversity and climate
A habitable climate depends on wildlife and biodiversity, because:
- Climate is a consequence of biodiversity and biodiversity is everything that ecosystems represent to life on Earth;
- A stable climate and therefore, a habitable Earth, depends on stabilising ecosystems; and
- Animals are the only mechanism that can do that.
As wildlife declines, we are breaking down biodiversity structure and losing energy (in the form of carbon) out of food chains and into the atmosphere and ocean. This way, climate and our food security are inextricably linked. We’re not only stripping soils of the material needed to feed us, we’re also introducing chaotic free energy into our atmosphere and causing huge fluctuations in the weather. The latter makes it harder for us to know when, where and how to feed ourselves.
Climate change: fossil fuels v. wildlife
Climate change has always been the symptom of biodiversity loss … that’s to say, the breakdown of the complex connectivity between lifeforms that allows Earth to flex in response to changing conditions.
Only recently have we created artificial climate change by mining carbon buried deep underground by animals millions of years ago. The animals that did that are no longer around and today’s animals, that would be busy moderating modern-day carbon, have populations that are heavily depleted.
We cannot engineer our way out of this crisis. We can only rebuild ecosystems rich in a diversity of animal life.
Latest posts about why the oceans are important
The environmental newspaper Mongabay published a piece titled ‘Animating the Carbon Cycle: Earth’s animals vital allies in CO2 storage.’ It’s long been known animals are essential for ecosystem vitality. But Professor Oswald Schmitz at the Yale School of the Environment tells me that: ‘I have been trying to get the scientific community to pay attention for a decade or more.’ In his work Schmitz describes how predatory arachnids absorb carbon in grassland.
There are so many paradoxes in ecological science. I have a love-hate relationship with them. I love them because they are so peculiar and hate them because they create so much misinterpretation – even among scientists.
For instance, there is the perennial idea that predators outcompete prey. Wrong. Without predators prey go extinct.
Spiders and carbon absorption
When it comes to carbon we also think it’s all bad. But we’re made from carbon. Carbon is also one of the most important elements that carries the sun’s energy around the Earth.
What Schmitz has discovered is the importance of ‘active’ predators at all scales from sharks to small creatures like spiders.
Excess carbon can mean a system is broken but it can also mean a system is being rebuilt.
In a 2017 study in the journal Ecology his team showed that ‘the amount of soil [Carbon] retention within a field should increase with the proportion of active hunting predators comprising the aboveground community of active hunting and sit-and-wait predators.’
By active, they mean jumping spiders and peacock spiders – ones that hunt rather than sit and wait at their web.
The results were really significant. Forty-one per cent of the variation in carbon was explained by this phenomenon. While plant biomass, insect and soil arthropod community composition, land use development, field age, and soil texture had little effect.
As I described in my article ‘Spiders weave the threads of a new beginning’, this group of creatures is incredibly powerful for rebuilding broken ecosystems.
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Spiders weave the threads of a new beginning
Ethan Linck’s Cataclysms to Desolate the World is a beautiful piece of nature writing about the loss of forest birds on Guam and the impact that introduced tree snakes have…
How it works
When predators are imposed on a system they create gaps in the structure. They apply pressure on herbivores and this actually creates a market-gap for more species. This same cascading diversification of pressures influences plants too. They bounce back stronger and more nutritious (richer in energy). Add in birds and mammals and you have a truly extraordinary and powerful system.
Without predators, this whole system becomes stagnant and collapses.
Grasslands are thousands of times more species-rich on a small scale, than rainforests and in the Czech Republic can have 44 species for every 25 x 25 cm – that’s 7,500 times more species-rich than a hectare of the Ecuadorian rainforest.
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Addressing the rapid decline of insects means having more insect-eating birds
The life-histories of insects and vertebrates are coupled. Predator and prey cannot exist without one-another. Species richness is higher in systems with predators [1] because they perform a function of…
Why is this important or controversial?
When you introduce animals into a system the increased carbon is initially amplified and in excess. This is before the other creatures have moved in to rebuild the structures. Scientists tend to measure ‘excess’ … because what isn’t in excess is practically invisible and immeasurable. Excess carbon can mean a system is broken but it can also mean a system is being rebuilt. This can be seen as a risk by those who don’t understand the role of animals in ecosystem stability.
But nature-based solutions to the biodiversity crisis are messy. They are also the only way to recreate a habitable planet and work faster than any other method. Simply leaving nature alone creates the quickest outcomes but that means going though ‘the dip’ as marketing expert Seth Godin explains. (There are strong similarities between all elements of human society and how ecosystems work, something you’ll discover if you read my book Wildlife in the Balance).
So, while excess carbon represents a ‘risk’ among climate-thinkers, we also need carbon concentrated at levels that deliver our food. In the end, we absorb more carbon into food systems where we need it. Remember, the amount of carbon on Earth hasn’t changed, only the distribution of it from where it is useful, to where it is not.
We are big animals. If we allow predators – including spiders – to go extinct, we kill ourselves. Our ecosystems become uninhabitable.
The only way to guarantee this isn’t going to happen is to allow animals to increase carbon in ecosystems. If that means helping spiders exist, it means using no pesticides. As each time we do that, we kill off the soil-creating mechanisms that we rely on for food.
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Pesticides have even poisoned the minds of farm scientists. Wildlife will save us.
University of Western Australia just published a paper that perfectly illustrates the dangers of basing an economy on ever decreasing circles of environmental degradation. However, the scientists don’t see it…
