Biodiversity
Welcome to c/Biodiversity @ Mander.xyz!
A community about the variety of life on Earth at all levels; including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi.
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This is a work in progress, please don't mind the mess.
2023-06-16: We invite our users to contribute resources for the sidebar.
2023-06-15: Looking for mods!
About
Biodiversity is a term used to describe the enormous variety of life on Earth. It can be used more specifically to refer to all of the species in one region or ecosystem. Biodiversity refers to every living thing, including plants, bacteria, animals, and humans. Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. However, only around 1.2 million species have been identified and described so far, most of which are insects. This means that millions of other organisms remain a complete mystery.
Over generations, all of the species that are currently alive today have evolved unique traits that make them distinct from other species. These differences are what scientists use to tell one species from another. Organisms that have evolved to be so different from one another that they can no longer reproduce with each other are considered different species. All organisms that can reproduce with each other fall into one species. Read more...
Rules
- Don't throw mud. Be kind and remember the human.
- Keep it rooted (on topic).
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Quick Links
Resources
- The Convention on Biological Diversity (UN)
- The Biodiversity Heritage Library
- Maps of the World's Biodiversity
- Ecosystems and Human Well-Being (free e-book)
- Falling Fruit: Map of the Urban Harvest
Bypass Paywalls
- On Ethics 1 2 3 4
- WaybackMachine (archive.org)
- Behind the Overlay Browser Extension
- ladder
- Anna's Archive
- Bypass Paywalls Browser Extension (see readme for Chrome & mobile options.)
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This is the best summary I could come up with:
But tests on the elephants that died in Zimbabwe have finally come back and shown the cause was a little-known bacterium called Pasteurella Bisgaard taxon 45, which resulted in septicaemia, or blood poisoning.
“This represents an important conservation concern for elephants in the largest remaining meta-population of this endangered species,” researchers wrote in the paper.
It was written by an international team of researchers from the Victoria Falls Wildlife Trust, the University of Surrey, laboratories in South Africa and the UK government’s Animal and Plant Health Agency (APHA).
Dr Arnoud van Vliet from the University of Surrey said the infection “adds to the growing list of disease-related threats to elephant conservation”.
Pasteurella bacteria has previously been linked to the sudden death of about 200,000 saiga antelopes in Kazakhstan – an incident that researchers believe could shed light on what happened to the elephant herds.
The paper says the findings of blood poisoning “may represent an ongoing phenomenon in this region”, with previous cases missed due to lack of testing.
The original article contains 603 words, the summary contains 169 words. Saved 72%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!