FreThink

If you only listen to politicians or prophets, the end of the world will come about dramatically, and according to many, soon. We are told to expect either wars in the heavens with gods battling gods over the fate of humanity or wars between nations involving nuclear weapons and mad men pushing the button.

Humans love drama. We also have an exaggerated notion of our importance to the universe. We cannot imagine the demise of humanity without a world-wide melodrama worthy of the best CGI artists in Hollywood. We simply cannot accept that humans could face extinction because bats disappeared first. Yet when you consider that all living systems on this planet are highly interdependent it’s a conclusion that is suddenly not very far-fetched.

Humans do not exist on Earth in isolation. We depend on the planet and our fellow creatures to provide what we need to survive. Strip the planet of all other living things and how long do you imagine humans could survive? A year, a month, a week? We’d have no food, no protection from the elements, no fresh air, none of the necessities of life. Over 90% of all the species that have ever existed are now extinct. What grand egotism leads us to believe we are exempt from the same natural processes?

It has only been in the last 100 years or so that we’ve had the scientific tools that permit us to examine the interconnections between us and all the other species with whom we share this isolated rock. In many cases we are just now beginning to learn how we all help each other survive. We are finding previously unsuspected dependencies between widely diverse groups of organisms, dependencies vital to our survival as a species. We are beginning to understand that the loss of one species in the chain of life can have drastic implications on the continued survival of other species thousands of miles away.

Case in point.

At least 1 million bats in the past three years have been wiped out by a puzzling, widespread disease dubbed “white-nose syndrome” in what preeminent US scientists are calling the most precipitous decline of North American wildlife in human history. If it isn’t slowed or stopped, they believe bats will continue disappearing from the landscape in huge numbers and that entire species could become extinct within a decade.

This would have drastic repercussions for the rest of us. As Tim King, a conservation geneticist with the US Geological Survey in West Virginia, told Chase, “We’re at the vanguard of an environmental catastrophe.”

Why? Because bats are insect-eating machines, capable of consuming nearly half their body weight in insects each night. Take them out of the equation and we’ll have an explosion of pests, including disease-carrying mosquitoes and agriculturally destructive beetles, moths, leafhoppers and other foes of the farmers, who may be forced to use more pesticides as a result.

Bat colonies in Massachusetts, New York, and Vermont have averaged a shocking 94.5 percent decline since white-nose syndrome was first detected there in 2006, plummeting from 48,626 bats to 2,695. The disease’s spread “has been terrifyingly swift,” according to the Globe, starting in the Northeast and South Atlantic states and now infiltrating “caves and mines in Kentucky and Tennessee, and possibly North Carolina and Ohio.”

But, unlike colony collapse disorder, the highly publicized disease that’s destroying our bees, white nose syndrome isn’t getting much attention. As Susi von Oettingen, a biologist who works for the US Fish and Wildlife Service, noted, “They’re not charismatic. . . . We don’t make money off of them. They are not cute and cuddly.” Let’s face it; even baby bats aren’t all that adorable.

This is more than just about bats dying. It’s about a key player in our ecosystem disappearing before our eyes. It may be a model for the severity of diseases that our native species are going to be confronted with.

If it’s frogs yesterday, bees two days ago, bats today, and something else in two more years, how long before this system falls apart on us?”

(Source-Eating Liberally)

So forget a nuclear or apocalyptic Armageddon. A far more likely scenario for the eventual extinction of the human animal is a slow imbalance of the entire ecosystem that leads to our inability to sustain ourselves. A failure of food crops due to the loss of pollinators, pandemics brought on by pestilence, silent but sure killers. How will we replace the bees and the bats? Do we even understand their complete role in making our lives possible?

We understand so little about the grand interconnectedness of life on this planet. And it’s quite likely our ignorance will prove fatal long before we manage to blow ourselves to kingdom come or we witness the great battle between good and evil in the sky above us.

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