The WWF paper presents wild animals' roles on land and in water, grouped into six categories:
-Pollinators
-Seed Dispersers
-Predators
-Soil Engineers
-Plankton Eaters
-Browsers and Grazers
Some animals, such as elephants, have multiple roles. No surprise there. Others - for example, scavengers such as hyenas and vultures - don't fit neatly into a category but play an important role just the same (cleaning up dead animals' carcasses helps prevent disease.)
Keep in mind as you read this: This is still just a glimpse at the many ways that wild animals help protect our planet. Their full stories are much more complex and the benefits far greater. (I am using the WWF's content as a guide here, but have re-written it for use in this article. Also: none of this content was lifted from AI.)
The roles:
-Pollinators (including bees, butterflies, bats, hummingbirds, lizards, rodents, ants)
Roughly one-third of all global food production relies on animal pollinators. Of the world's 1,400 crop plants - the ones that produce human food and plant-based industrial products - almost 80% require pollination by various animals.
Visits from pollinators also result in larger, more flavorful fruits and higher crop yields.
Without these pollinators, the human race and all of earth’s terrestrial ecosystems could not survive long-term.
Then there's the financial impact these animals deliver just through the act of pollination: Researchers have placed global values on these services ranging from $195 billion to $657 billion annually, depending on methodology and data sources
-Seed Dispersers (incl. elephants, primates, deer, birds, green [aquatic] turtles, insects, flying foxes)
Animals of all types - at sea, in the air, on the ground - eat seeds here and excrete them there, sometimes many miles away from the source. In this way, the seeds of trees, plants, and flowers are distributed around, helping to increase not only the quantity and variety of vegetation but also the animals attracted to them.
Seed dispersers' crucial role boosts biodiversity, which in turn strengthens an ecosystem by ensuring habitat diversity, connectivity, and resilience. These services are also important for climate change mitigation and adaptation.
-Predators (incl. wolves, orcas, sharks, otters, storks, owls, spiders)
Predators play a critical role in regulating populations of not only their prey but their prey’s food and their competitors. Their "fear factor" also serves to curb over-grazing - prey animals eat and move on. This control can have huge overall beneficial effects on an ecosystem - for both flora and fauna.
One famous example of what occurs when an apex predator is eradicated - and then brought back - is the 1995 reintroduction of grey wolves to Yellowstone National Park. After the wolves were purposely killed off, elk populations exploded, and as a result, local shrub and tree growth came to a standstill and large areas of the park suffered.
Re-introducing wolves brought the elk population back under control, and within two years, remarkable new plant growth was being recorded.
-Soil Engineers (incl. ants, worms, beavers, dung beetles, elephants, large herbivores, termites, prairie dogs)
Soil, and the animals and plants living in it, make up the so-called ‘critical zone’, the Earth’s living skin, that sustains life and helps to regulate climate. This is home to more than 25% of the Earth’s total biodiversity.
A wide variety of animals rework soils and sediments through their natural actions: Foraging, burrowing, burying, wallowing, trampling, ingesting, defecating, resting, and nesting. All of these actions make animals very effective soil engineers, contributing to nutrient cycling and retention, water retention, food production, and fire and climate regulation.
-Plankton Eaters (incl. whales, sharks, sand eels, sea birds, sardines, oysters, salmon)
Phytoplankton are tiny; five of them can fit onto a pin-head. Yet they are a foundational element of all life on Earth. Like grasses and trees, they convert light energy into biomass and chemical energy.
In doing so, they sequester billions of tons of carbon, all while producing 50% of the oxygen in our atmosphere.
Seems like a fairly good reason to protect them.
There's only one problem: Phytoplankton live near the water's surface - giving them access to the sunlight they need, but not to certain nutrients they also need that exist only in deep water.
That's where whales come in. When they dive down into the ocean's depths to feed on other types of plankton - especially krill - whales bring those nutrients back up to the surface and excrete them into the shallow waters, thereby feeding and fertilizing the phytoplankton. And because whales' migrational range is often thousands of miles, they deposit these nutrients throughout our oceans.
Other plankton-eaters at sea and on land contribute to this critical global process of nutrient-spreading. However, the dwindling numbers of these animals now threatens our long-term well-being on this planet.
-Browsers and Grazers (incl. bison, wildebeest, elephants, tapirs and howler monkeys, parrotfish, manatees)
Herbivores are key players in maintaining their habitats through grazing, browsing, trampling, smashing, wallowing, transporting and fertilizing seeds in their dung, migrating - and even dying.
On land and at sea, we depend on browsers and grazers to maintain wild vegetation - and to help reduce the carbon-related damage we create.
Unlike trees, grasses grow from the bottom; with the constant grazing of wild animals such as bison (particularly in the American plains) and wildebeest (particularly in the African savannah), the roots of these grasses remain healthy and able to reproduce new shoots.
This process not only feeds the animal herds and helps to reduce Earth's carbon dioxide; it also serves to prevent the dangerous (and polluting) wildfires that occur when grasses get too long and dry.
Browsers and grazers also help move nutrients to where they're needed most. For example, it's estimated that in the tropical forests of the Amazon, the grazing of large herbivores such as tapirs, peccaries, and howler monkeys moves approximately $900 million worth of phosphorus each year from nutrient-rich areas to nutrient-poor areas.
At sea, parrotfish help to maintain the vegetation in coral reefs - which are essential to coastline ecosystems - with their constant nibbling. And in tropical seagrass meadows, manatees maintain vegetation in much the same way as bison and wildebeest on land - which results in more carbon sequestration.
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