The Vulture Edition

Colin here. I was in the Kalahari desert earlier this month, and really enjoyed learning how deeply interconnected the ecosystem was. For example, Meerkats, the internet favorite, are actually responsible for eating pounds and pounds of insects. If they are removed or disrupted, the insects then feast on a lot of the foliage, leading to less of this for other animals, and voila, a disrupted ecosystem leads to lots of animals dying and many other bad things.

Why is this interesting? 

The Economist recently wrote about another example of delicate ecosystems:

The near-extinction of Indian vultures in the mid-1990s proved fatal for humans too, causing the mortality rate to rise by 4% in districts once populated by the birds. Vultures act as nature’s sanitation service. In India, their diet consisted largely of rotting livestock carcasses—numbering 30m a year in the cattle-revering country. A group of vultures can polish off a cow’s carrion in 40 minutes. Their strongly acidic digestive tracts destroy most germs. Historically, vultures were widespread in India. But between the 1990s and early 2000s their numbers plummeted by more than 90%, from around 40m. The cause was diclofenac, an anti-inflammatory drug that farmers began using to treat their cattle. Though the drug was harmless to both cows and humans, birds that consumed animals treated with diclofenac suffered from kidney failure and died within weeks.

The knock-on effect of fewer vultures was disastrous. Other scavengers picked away at carcasses, and then transmitted disease into villages and into the drinking water. Because of these pathogens, people got sick and died at higher rates.

Both the meerkat and the vulture don’t seem like the most noble of animals, but both are designated as keystone species for their respective habitats. They are the ecological glue that holds things together, and without them, chaos can ensue. (CJN) 

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