Natural history dying of neglect

http://www.sfu.ca/pamr/media-releases/2014/natural-history-dying-of-neglect.html

March 26, 2014
Simon Fraser University, Canada
Contact: Anne Salomon
Carol Thorbes

Links:
http://naturalhistorynetwork.org/the-natural-history-initiative/

Natural history provides essential knowledge for human wellbeing, yet its research, use and instruction in academia, government agencies and non-government organizations is declining drastically.

Simon Fraser University ecologist Anne Salomon is among 17 authors of a new paper that claims this decline in the developed world could seriously undermine the world’s progress in research, conservation and management.

The paper, Natural History’s Place in Science and Society, evaluates the state of natural history research and use today. The journal BioScience has just published the paper online.

Natural history is the study of the fundamental nature of organisms, and how and where they live and interact with their environment.

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The authors say 75 per cent of emerging infectious human diseases, including avian influenza, Lyme disease, cholera and rabies, are linked to other animals at some point in their life cycle. Control strategies rely on knowledge of the hosts’ natural history.

The authors note there are all kinds of examples throughout history of how the world could have avoided natural resource-based calamities, had it paid attention to natural history’s fundamentals.

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For example, opossum shrimp were introduced into British Columbia’s Kootenay Lake and other lakes in the western United States in the 1960s as food to boost the production of salmon.

But instead of acting as food, the shrimp migrated to deep water to avoid being eaten by fish during the day and returned to lake surfaces at night to feed on the same food eaten by juvenile salmon.

Salmon numbers ended up declining, triggering declines in bald eagles and tourists. Ironically, scientists already knew the vertical migration pattern of these introduced shrimp. So had the details of the shrimp’s natural history been acknowledged, the authors write, their introduction’s outcome could have been predicted.

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