If I had to pick one introduction that could potentially have the greatest positive impact on biodiversity...then I think that I'd have to go with introducing hummingbirds to the rest of the world. Because I'm pretty sure that we all benefit when there's more, rather than less, pollinators. But I could be wrong. And to be clear, in no way shape or form am I advocating or supporting the illegal introduction of any plant or animal. I guess it's impossible for me to say that enough.
Here's my reply to tropterrarium...
herclivation. Hopefully it contains information that everybody interested in the topic will find informative. Especially the part about paging versus scrolling.
Orchid Whisperer, gnathaniel...your last posts were definitely worthy of blog entries.
calvin_orchidL, good questions.
1. For me the goal is greater biodiversity.
2. For the most part, hedging bets is a pretty good strategy for minimizing harm. Given that I'm advocating that we hedge our bets, you're basically asking what's the potential harm of hedging our bets. In other words, you're asking what's the potential harm of trying to minimize potential harm.
3. Can we accomplish the same goal in cultivation? I don't think we can duplicate natural selection and adapative radiation in cultivation.
4. Hmmm...introduce a fitter lindenii? Well, it's not much of a hedge. Not sure if you heard of it, but there's
a million orchid project in Florida. Basically they grow a bunch of native epiphytic orchids from seed and then attach them to street trees. It's pretty great. But imagine if the one million orchids were all clones of the same exact orchid. Even if the clone was wonderful...it would still be only one combination of traits. In essence it would be putting a lot of eggs in one basket. You could even put more eggs in one basket by putting all million orchids in one neighborhood. If that neighborhood was devastated by a hurricane or extreme cold then that would be it. Increasing variety/difference of traits/locations would increase the chances of success.
5. The immediate problem that we'd be trying to solve is that lindenii might have too much sameness/uniformity to handle the significant changes to its environment.
orchidsarefun, not sure about a timeline. I mean, there's no timeline if there isn't substantial expert support for herclivation of Dendrophylax. And I'm not even sure if the experts would agree about
translocation of closely related species to Florida.
Well...if I missed anything then hopefully my blog entry covered it. If not then feel free to bring them up again.
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