Biodiversity: Top predators critical to ecoystem health which I found at Summit County Citizen's Voice website. To read the entire article pleas click on the highlighted words in the previous sentensce.
This new study and its conclusions certainly are troubling news! As stated in the article:
"Plummeting numbers of apex consumers are most pronounced among the big predators."..."There also are dramatic declines in populations of many large herbivores"...
If apex predators are removed from an ecosystem, many very bad consequences can occur, as pointed out in the article.However, other scientists consider another consequence to be even more severe from such a situation,that being, "a huge increase in smaller "mesopredators" that are causing major economic and ecological disruptions." "Mesopredators are middle trophic level predators such as raccoons, skunks, snakes, cownose rays, and small sharks."
This consequence was first pointed out in the article "Loss of Top Predators Causing Ecosystems to Collapse" which was published at the LiveScience.com website and which can be accessed by clicking on the following link:
http://www.livescience.com/9716-loss-top-predators-causing-ecosystems-collapse.html
As stated in the livescience.com article:
"Primary or apex predators can actually benefit prey populations by suppressing smaller predators, and failure to consider this mechanism has triggered collapses of entire ecosystems."
So once again our species has been shown to adversely affect the other life on this planet and the ecosystems within which this life exists! Humans need to stop killing apex predators, because of fear, ignorance or selfishness, if all of the in the ecosystems on our planet are to avoid collapse!
Here are some other articles which are directly related to these new scientific findings:
1. Effects of Shark Decline:http://www.coml.org/discoveries/trends/shark_decline_effects
2.Why Healthy Oceans need sharks: http://na.oceana.org/sites/default/files/o/fileadmin/oceana/uploads/Sharks/Predators_as_Prey_FINAL_FINAL.pdf (You need a program that can read PDF Files to read the article).
3.The Rise of the Mesopredator:
http://www.cof.orst.edu/leopold/papers/mesopredators.pdf (Again this article is in PDF format).
