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How does an Animal Becoming Extinct Impact the Environment?
- Reasons for animals becoming extinct
Well people say extinction is bad, but how and why is it bad? An animal becoming extinct impacts the environment because animals, being a part of the ecosystem, have different roles for the environment. For these reasons animals that become extinct affect the environment and ecosystem in very harsh ways. These are the listed reason that scientists and experts believe are most common in causing animals to become extinct:
- Habitat loss. If you didn’t know, habitat is another word for an animal's home. Habitat loss can be very harmful to animals because animals rely and have their habitat for a reason being: to live in it. The two main reasons for habitat loss are natural disasters destroying the animals' habitat and human explosion. These cause animals to lose their habitat and end up without a home and without the shelter the animals will eventually die in the wild in different ways. One of the ways an animal could die in the wild is poachers poaching.
- Human explosion. Humans are the cause of many animals going extinct because of our selfish and self centered need for things like money, status and power. From littering, to poaching, human exploitation is another prime example of animal extinction. Humans have also put many animals on the brink of extinction or the critically endangered list. Humans are also to do with the previously mentioned habitat loss because they could chop down trees and destroy habitats to start and create towns and cities. Animals like tigers, elephants, the rinosauras and many other animals have been affected by human explosion and been put on the endangered list. Other animals have gone extinct due to human explosion. Humans poach because if we find a rare species we want to kill it and sell its rare body parts like a rhino and its horn or tigers’ fur. We also take over animal’s habitat and humanize the area, creating towns and cities. Sadly many don’t understand the damage that they are doing to the environment, causing problems and endangering and killing off many species.
- Invasive species. Invasive species are another prime example of animal extinction. Invasive species are species not native to the local ecosystem and when they are introduced, they can ruin and destroy the ecosystem because this species has many of its prey living in the area and few to none predators in the area, this might also sound like an apex predator but the two have many differences. The ecosystem will also be forced to adapt to the invasive species changes to the environment. The invasive species can harm or even worse extinct some of the animals living in the environment. An apex predator is born at the top of the food chain and has no predators whatsoever. Invasive species are mainly caused by humans but sometimes it can be caused by an animal wandering into another area, causing its population to overflow.
Though there are many other reasons for an animal to become extinct these are the ones that are most known and most common and pop up when searched. This is very important and very bad because an animal becoming extinct can impact the ecosystem in very bad and very different ways but it depends on prey or predator.
Causes and Effects of Animal Extinction
Animals are very important because they balance the ecosystem for example: if a type of fish went extinct, animals like dolphins, whales, sharks, seals and other animals will starve because the fish has gone extinct. Though the fish probably isn’t their only source of food they still lose one of their most important food sources. The predator population will die just like the fish that has gone extinct. But if a predator goes extinct it would have the opposite effect because if a predator goes extinct its prey's population will explode and blow up because the prey doesn’t have enough predators to keep its population in check. If then the prey will destroy the ecosystem because of how big the numbers of its population are. If the prey population kills off other animals then the ecosystem starts to tear apart and begin to fall because now many animals start to get affected by this.
Effects on the Food Chain
If an animal goes extinct then it will be taken out of the food chain because there are no more of the species so keeping it in the food chain would be pointless. Many people don’t understand that poaching rare animals is bad for the ecosystem and the animal population. It impacts the food chain making massive changes to the diet of an animal that eats the extinct animal or it can affect the prey and their population when a predator goes extinct. Animals also have adapted different diets. The orca(killer whale) has adapted to eating animals besides fish like other dolphins, whales, seals and others. This is making the population of some of these animals die down, putting them in the endangered category. Plants and animals are all in the food chain and if one of them goes extinct then that would break the food chain in many different ways. Because animals are going extinct the food chain is slowly falling apart because of the lack of animals to hold it up.