[Taxacom] FW: Biodiversity and Species Value

[John Shuey]

A few notes to clarify my rambling post from my dimly lit back porch last night.

The entities that implement conservation don’t really ponder the evolutionary “uniqueness” of individual target species.  Value as you are discussing it, is subjective and biased by personal experience – the resulting conservation agenda would be weirdly screwed by all this bias.  Value as defined by the conservation community is a cold, hard evaluation of resource allocation – how do you maximize conservation bang for the buck.   Your time spent pondering ”phylogentic conservation value” might better be spent counting angels on pin heads (sorry – couldn’t resist!).

To follow-up on horseshoe crabs – ironically there is quite a bit of conservation interest pointed in their direction at the moment – but is has nothing to do with their odd evolutionary history.  As it turns out, their seasonal mass spawning – the release of hurdreds of tons of eggs each night – is a critical resource that migrating shore birds on the East Coast depend upon.  If crab stocks are reduced below a critical threshold, it could have a ripple through impact on shore birds and the ecosystems they influence in North and South America.

And Curtis states the obvious about great apes.  I’d like to “claim” that they are treated just like every other species.  That their habitats are identified as critical for inclusion in a complementary scheme of conservation sites.  And that the actual site designs and strategies for specific conservation areas simply include them as an “area sensitive species”, so that  great apes (and big cats for a more typical example) can maintain viable populations for the foreseeable future.   The reality is that they ARE GREAT APES – and almost everyone interjects personal bias in prioritizing them for conservation.  

Again, sorry about the "angels on a pinhead thing" - but there are things you could be worrying about that would have a more tangible impact on conservation.

John Shuey