what are the present human biological diversity?
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what are the present human biological diversity?
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Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science, Harvard University, Museum of Comparative Zoology, Cambridge, Massachusetts
Biological diversity must be treated more seriously as a global resource, to be indexed, used, and above all, preserved. Three circumstances conspire to give this matter an unprecedented urgency. First, exploding human populations are degrading the environment at an accelerating rate, especially in tropical countries. Second, science is discovering new uses for biological diversity in ways that can relieve both human suffering and environmental destruction. Third, much of the diversity is being irreversibly lost through extinction caused by the destruction of natural habitats, again especially in the tropics. Overall, we are locked into a race. We must hurry to acquire the knowledge on which a wise policy of conservation and development can be based for centuries to come.
To summarize the problem in this chapter, I review some current information on the magnitude of global diversity and the rate at which we are losing it. I concentrate on the tropical moist forests, because of all the major habitats, they are richest in species and because they are in greatest danger.
THE AMOUNT OF BIOLOGICAL DIVERSITY
Many recently published sources, especially the multiauthor volume Synopsis and Classification of Living Organisms, indicate that about 1.4 million living species of all kinds of organisms have been described (Parker, 1982; see also the numerical breakdown according to major taxonomic category of the world insect fauna prepared by Arnett, 1985). Approximately 750,000 are insects, 41,000 are vertebrates, and 250,000 are plants (that is, vascular plants and bryophytes). The remainder consists of a complex array of invertebrates, fungi, algae, and microorganisms (see Table 1-1). Most systematists agree that this picture is still very incomplete except in a few well-studied groups such as the vertebrates and flowering plants. If insects, the most species-rich of all major groups, are included, I believe that the absolute number is likely to exceed 5 million. Recent intensive collections made by Terry L. Erwin and his associates in the canopy of the Peruvian Amazon rain forest have moved the plausible upper limit much higher. Previously unknown insects proved to be so numerous in these samples that when estimates of local diversity were extrapolated to include all rain forests in the world, a figure of 30 million species was obtained (Erwin, 1983). In an even earlier stage is research on the epiphytic plants, lichens, fungi, roundworms, mites, protozoans, bacteria, and other mostly small organisms that abound in the treetops. Other major habitats that remain poorly explored include the coral reefs, the floor of the deep sea, and the soil of tropical forests and savannas. Thus, remarkably, we do not know the true number of species on Earth, even to the nearest order of magnitude (Wilson, 1985a). My own guess, based on the described fauna and flora and many discussions with entomologists and other specialists, is that the absolute number falls somewhere between 5 and 30 million.
A brief word is needed on the meaning of species as a category of classification In modern biology, species are regarded conceptually as a population or series of populations within which free gene flow occurs under natural conditions. This means that all the normal, physiologically competent individuals at a given time are capable of breeding with all the other individuals of the opposite sex belonging to the same species or at least that they are capable of being linked genetically to them through chains of other breeding individuals. By definition they do not breed freely with members of other species.
This biological concept of species is the best ever devised, but it remains less than ideal. It works very well for most animals and some kinds of plants, but for some plant and a few animal populations in which intermediate amounts of hybridization occur, or ordinary sexual reproduction has been replaced by self-fertilization or parthenogenesis, it must be replaced with arbitrary divisions.
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