Ecologists propose ousting species to save ecosystems

Ecologists propose ousting species to save ecosystems

www.scientificamerican.com

Could you prevent nine local extinctions by hastening one extinction? It sounds completely counterintuitive, but a pair of ecosystem modelers are proposing that conservationists could sometimes prop up a troubled ecosystem by removing one or more of its species--and using models to determine the timing and order of those removals.

The species that make up an ecosystem are connected in complex "food webs" of eater and eaten. When one species disappears, its predators can no longer eat it and its prey are no longer eaten by it. Changes in these populations affect others. Such impact 'casca

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Don't we ever learn? Nature is not intended to be manipulated. Man has many times introduced a species into a new environment which has sent the ecosystem awry. Many times the new species will prey upon, and eventually take over their new habitat.
Now it is being proposed in reverse. To kill off a species so that others might live. Playing God to create an extinction?
On paper i see how this might look ok. But in reality?
I don't see anything good. Pretty scary where things are going. Leave nature alone.

www.scientificamerican.com
(visit the link for the full news article)

Stupidist thing I've ever heard!! Why do these people insist on messing with nature.. You can't just take something from the food chain, everything has it's purpose or it wouldn't be here. It worked perfectly before we came along and started messing things up!!
Just makes me thing of the bull toad in Australia. That seemed like a good idea at the time.. Now look at the problems it is causing..

Wow, don't we ever learn not to play God. We're not talking about keeping a species controlled through hunting etc, to keep the balance. Unfortunately we're the cause of most of this through greed and infringing upon animals habitat. The elimination of a species is scary. What scares me most are these computer modules, and the problem is these computers are programmed by man to forecast the future and we can only do that with the information we have now. Predicting the future and playing God is not something any of us should entertain for even a minute. Are we next?

This is an off hand way to say we need to make human beings extinct. Eliminate humans, and you save most of the species on the planet.

I can't see any good coming out of this. Nature is a self balancing mechanism and should not be manipulated in this kind of way. Nature always kicks our butts in the end, i.e. flood control on rivers causing worse floods when Nature overtakes our barriers.

NO NO NO. That's going to create much, much more problems then even needed. Each and every species relies on one another. You do not kill one to extinction just because you want to 'balance'. Nature will balance itself out without the help of those greedy humans.

I'm so sick of hearing how brilliant these smart scientists / scholars are... all those years of schooling and they are all stupid. They muck with our DNA , our food the wildlife and forests, not mention the water , soil and the atmosphere. a pack of over educated crazy’s with no morals.

While I agree with most of the posters here that nature should not be manipulated, I don't want to go so far as to say that the scientists are stupid. I would use the word naive. Unfortunately many of these brilliant minds, and many are indeed brilliant by academia measures, have little common sense. They just look at data, without seeing the entire picture as it really exists. That is what is so scary to me.

Alot of the decision makers are not overly intelligent, and highly influenced by data. It seems to me that when these brilliant scientists are making their presentations using words that contain a dozen syllables to the decision makers, those decision makers are nodding their heads in agreement with glazed over eyes while what they are actually thinking about is what they are going to have for dinner, and maybe they'll make tonights martini a double.

I hope that this proposal gets shot down quicker than flight 93. Nature is not a lego set to be constructed and deconstructed at will.

Originally posted by Misterlondon
Stupidist thing I've ever heard!! Why do these people insist on messing with nature..

2 Words - Ignorant / Egotistical believing the world/universe revolves around us is just narrow minded and IMHO is behind with times, we need to think about reparing nature not destroying it!