Sustainability & Biodiversity
Unsustainable development and biodiversity are two major concepts that are vastly important to the environment and all humans should be aware of these two concepts and how to ensure a better environment using sustainability. To begin with, unsustainability or unsustainable development has a crucial effect on planet Earth that is caused by human carelessness. Moreover, biodiversity, which is the variety of life or species in the environment, is dependent on whether humans choose to live with a sustainable development or unsustainable development. If people choose to live with unsustainable development, biodiversity would decrease; because pollution and people’s waste ruin biodiversity by killing species.
We were assigned a small lab to do, which I think was very helpful for us, it made us understand the idea of carrying capacity and how it could help biodiversity. Carrying capacity is the quantity of species that can live in a certain area without environmental degradation. If there is a large number of different species in one area, there wouldn’t be enough resources for them to survive. Furthermore, too little amount of species is never going to produce the amount of production needed; but also too much can affect other organisms since there aren’t going to be enough natural supplies or resources for every organism living in that area.
The lab was very simple in the beginning; we had to create a forest that would attract as many squirrels as possible. We had five different tree species that produced acorns and there were 3 different sizes of these trees; we had to pick any amount of any tree and draw it on a poster. We didn’t know at the time how much acorns could each tree produce, so we tried to have a few from every species and every one of the three sizes; and we also added a water stream. After we drew the poster we had to calculate the amount of acorns that all trees are able to produce and how much do we need for squirrels to survive in our forest. With all the trees we had the total production of acorns was 340,000 kcal while a squirrel needs 50,005 kcal per year so after all calculations we came to a conclusion that only 7 squirrels could live in our forest. We didn’t have a fair amount of acorns for a lot of squirrels so only 7 could have survived in our forest but others couldn’t. However, having different types of trees and squirrels scattered around in the forest helps have a bigger variety of species (Biodiversity). Knowing the right amount of resources we need to have helps in biodiversity because of sustainability.
This was the forest we came up with. Each color is a different type of tree.
Another lab we had to do was one named “Tragedy of the Commons”. The lab was immensely efficacious. The directions were very simple in the beginning when all we thought we had to do was capture as many fish as possible so we can get an exceptional profit. Then after the first round, the directions for every two of the same type of fish in the river we put one of the same kind (as if it reproduced); but we realized we didn’t have enough fish to reproduce. So we started from the beginning and we came up with a strategy/plan. We decided to leave at least two fish of every kind, and that was our plan. The fish started to reproduce a lot so we had a quite fair amount of fish in the river. To sum up, in part one our fishing was not sustainable because at a point we ran out of fish during the second round. This happened because we didn’t plan ahead and we overfished to a point where there wasn’t enough fish of the same kind to reproduce. This shows unsustainability because that’s what people do in real life, people keep using natural resources blindly till they wear out.
In conclusion, unsustainability decreases biodiversity which slows the rate of evolution just like how in the lab the fish weren’t able to reproduce because of unsustainable development. When biodiversity decreases, evolution decreases and natural selection starts degrading. Both labs reveal how sustainability affects biodiversity and the variety of genes that could be produced when there is sustainable development.
We were assigned a small lab to do, which I think was very helpful for us, it made us understand the idea of carrying capacity and how it could help biodiversity. Carrying capacity is the quantity of species that can live in a certain area without environmental degradation. If there is a large number of different species in one area, there wouldn’t be enough resources for them to survive. Furthermore, too little amount of species is never going to produce the amount of production needed; but also too much can affect other organisms since there aren’t going to be enough natural supplies or resources for every organism living in that area.
The lab was very simple in the beginning; we had to create a forest that would attract as many squirrels as possible. We had five different tree species that produced acorns and there were 3 different sizes of these trees; we had to pick any amount of any tree and draw it on a poster. We didn’t know at the time how much acorns could each tree produce, so we tried to have a few from every species and every one of the three sizes; and we also added a water stream. After we drew the poster we had to calculate the amount of acorns that all trees are able to produce and how much do we need for squirrels to survive in our forest. With all the trees we had the total production of acorns was 340,000 kcal while a squirrel needs 50,005 kcal per year so after all calculations we came to a conclusion that only 7 squirrels could live in our forest. We didn’t have a fair amount of acorns for a lot of squirrels so only 7 could have survived in our forest but others couldn’t. However, having different types of trees and squirrels scattered around in the forest helps have a bigger variety of species (Biodiversity). Knowing the right amount of resources we need to have helps in biodiversity because of sustainability.
This was the forest we came up with. Each color is a different type of tree.
Another lab we had to do was one named “Tragedy of the Commons”. The lab was immensely efficacious. The directions were very simple in the beginning when all we thought we had to do was capture as many fish as possible so we can get an exceptional profit. Then after the first round, the directions for every two of the same type of fish in the river we put one of the same kind (as if it reproduced); but we realized we didn’t have enough fish to reproduce. So we started from the beginning and we came up with a strategy/plan. We decided to leave at least two fish of every kind, and that was our plan. The fish started to reproduce a lot so we had a quite fair amount of fish in the river. To sum up, in part one our fishing was not sustainable because at a point we ran out of fish during the second round. This happened because we didn’t plan ahead and we overfished to a point where there wasn’t enough fish of the same kind to reproduce. This shows unsustainability because that’s what people do in real life, people keep using natural resources blindly till they wear out.
In conclusion, unsustainability decreases biodiversity which slows the rate of evolution just like how in the lab the fish weren’t able to reproduce because of unsustainable development. When biodiversity decreases, evolution decreases and natural selection starts degrading. Both labs reveal how sustainability affects biodiversity and the variety of genes that could be produced when there is sustainable development.
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