Neccessary Animals?

Okay, I’m over here in a blazing hot desert, and these flys really need to go. In a conversation we are currently having, they decided to ask the local think tank and procurer of useless information (me) what would happen to the ecosystem if we removed flies.

What do you guys think?

I do not even know how to begin to think.

It just illustrates the limitedness of the human mind and our disability to know anything.

What I can think are two kind of things, make hypotheses and run a simulation.

The former is easy and some are:

  1. Some other species for which the flies are in competition will now succeed better, and you have replace one nuisance, humanly speaking for another. For example there are now no flies maggots to eat away dead flesh, and this in turn may lead to another organism that eat up the dead flesh and this organism may be more harmful to humans.

  2. Some speices like flowers for which the flies pollinate will die out.

  3. The bacteria and viruses some of which lead to fatal diseases or sickness in human beings will stop propagating, and some human beings, which were marked for death by natural selection, will not die, and one of these one day becomes Saddam Hussein Jr.

As for simulation we need to know everything about the fly’s role in the ecosystem, and also of the ecosystem that are currently suppressed by the fly’s presence and activities. I do not think we have known everything. But lets assume we know a bit, maybe we can go on with the simulation, but there is no certainty that the results are true, as we may have missed some crucial but yet unknown fact, such as the mysterious organism that may thrived should the flies’ maggots be missing.

The bottom line is that the world is inherently “chaotic” in the technical sense of the word, ie the outcome of a small change can have very very drastic and unforseen and unforseeable effects in the whole world.

And secondly since it is almost impossible to eradicate (but is it? am I shooting myself in my foot? :astonished: ) a species, this whole exercise is moot and a waste of time, or is it? :smiley:

I saw you heading slowly, but surely, towards the Chaos Theory at the end. But that’s cool. Thanks for your delightful response. We were discussing out here the other animals that we can completly wipe out and there will be no change to the ecosystem.

Then someone mentioned that animals like chickens and cows would have died off hundreds of years ago, but our fascination with them as food has kept them around. Any thoughts?

So it is with cats and dogs. Our obsession with their “cuteness” makes them one of the most successful species around.

As for the no change to ecosystem when a species is made extinct by humans, that we dont know. For what it can be we will never know.

Another thought is the idea of man’s sovereignty over the animals. It is apparently completely in our power to wipe out or to save a species, eg the panda or the whale or the gorilla.

But it is these pesky irritating animals like the fly and the mosquitoe or a virus that challenged our sovereignty and for which we are powerless to wipe out.