Everything about Wild Animal totally explained
Wildlife includes all non-domesticated plants, animals, and other organisms. Domesticating wild plant and animal species for human benefit has occurred many times all over the planet, and has a major impact on the environment, both positive and negative.
Wildlife can be found in all ecosystems, Deserts, rainforests, plains, and other areas—including the most developed
urban sites—all have distinct forms of wildlife. While the term in popular culture usually refers to animals that are untouched by human factors, most scientists agree that wildlife around the world is impacted by human activities.
Humans have historically tended to separate civilization from wildlife in a number of ways including the legal, social, and moral sense. This has been a reason for debate throughout recorded history. Religions have often declared certain animals to be sacred, and in modern times concern for the natural environment has provoked activists to protest the exploitation of wildlife for human benefit or entertainment. Literature has also made use of the traditional human separation from wildlife.
Food
Anthropologists believe that the
Stone Age peoples and
hunter-gatherers relied on wildlife, both plant and animal, for their food. In fact, some species may have been hunted to
extinction by early human hunters. Today, hunting,
fishing, or gathering wildlife is still a significant food source in some parts of the world. In other areas, hunting and non-commercial fishing are mainly seen as a
sport or
recreation, with the edible meat as mostly a side benefit. Meat sourced from wildlife that isn't traditionally regarded as game is known as
bushmeat. The increasing demand for wildlife as a source of traditional food in
East Asia is decimating populations of
sharks,
primates,
pangolins and other animals, which they believe have aphrodisiac properties.
Religion
Many wildlife species have spiritual significance in different cultures around the world, and they and their products may be used as
sacred objects in
religious rituals. For example,
eagles,
hawks and their
feathers have great
cultural and
spiritual value to
Native Americans as religious objects.
Television
Wildlife has long been a common subject for
educational
television shows.
National Geographic specials appeared on
CBS beginning in
1965, later moving to
ABC and then
PBS. In
1963,
NBC debuted
Wild Kingdom, a popular program featuring
zoologist Marlin Perkins as host. The
BBC natural history unit in the
UK was a similar pioneer, the first wildlife series LOOK presented by
Sir Peter Scott, was a studio-based show, with filmed inserts. It was in this series that
David Attenborough first made his appearance which led to the series Zoo Quest during which he and cameraman Charles Lagus went to many exotic places looking for elusive wildlife -- notably the
Komodo dragon in Indonesia and
lemurs in Madagascar. Since
1984, the
Discovery Channel and its spinoff
Animal Planet in the USA have dominated the market for shows about wildlife on cable television, while on
PBS the NATURE strand made by WNET-13 in New York and NOVA by WGBH in Boston are notable. See also
Nature documentary. Wildlife television is now a multi-million dollar industry with specialist documentary film-makers in many countries including UK, USA, New Zealand
NHNZ, Australia, Austria, Germany, Japan, and Canada.
Tourism
Fuelled by media coverage and inclusion of conservation education in early school curriculum, Wildlife
tourism & Ecotourism has fast become a popular industry generating substantial income for poor nations with rich wildlife specially in
Africa and
India. This ever growing and ever becoming more popular form of tourism is providing the much needed incentive for poor nations to conserve their rich wildlife heritage and its habitat.
Destruction
This subsection focuses on
anthropogenic forms of wildlife destruction.
Exploitation of wild populations has been a characteristic of modern man since our exodus from
Africa 130,000 – 70,000 years ago. The rate of
extinctions of entire species of plants and animals across the planet has been so high in the last few hundred years it's widely considered that we're in the sixth great extinction event on this planet; the
Holocene Mass Extinction.
Destruction of wildlife doesn't always lead to an extinction of the species in question, however, the dramatic loss of entire species across Earth dominates any review of wildlife destruction as extinction is the level of damage to a wild population from which there's no return.
The four most general reasons that lead to destruction of wildlife include overkill, habitat destruction and fragmentation, impact of introduced species and chains of extinction.
Overkill
Overkill occurs whenever hunting occurs at rates greater than the reproductive capacity of the population is being exploited. The effects of this are often noticed much more dramatically in slow growing populations such as many larger species of fish. Initially when a portion of a wild population is hunted, an increased availability of resources (food, etc) is experienced increasing growth and reproduction as
Density dependent inhibition is lowered. Hunting,
fishing and so on, has lowered the competition between members of a population. However, if this hunting continues at rate greater than the rate at which new members of the population can reach breeding age and produce more young, the population will begin to
decrease in numbers.
Populations in confined to islands – whether literal islands or just areas of habitat that are effectively an “island” for the species concerned – have also been observed to be at greater risk of dramatic population declines following
unsustainable hunting.
Habitat destruction and fragmentation
The
habitat of any given species is considered its preferred area or territory. Many processes associated human habitation of an area cause loss of this area and the decrease the carrying capacity of the land for that species. In many cases these changes in land use cause a patchy break-up of the wild landscape. Agricultural land frequently displays this type of extremely fragmented, or relictual, habitat. Farms sprawl across the landscape with patches of uncleared woodland or forest dotted in-between occasional paddocks.
Examples of habitat destruction include grazing of bushland by farmed animals, changes to natural fire regimes, forest clearing for timber production and wetland draining for city expansion.
Impact of introduced species
Mice, cats,
rabbits,
dandelions and
poison ivy are all examples of species that have become invasive threats to wild species in various parts of the world. Frequently species that are uncommon in their home range become out-of-control invasions in distant but similar climates. The reasons for this have not always been clear and
Charles Darwin felt it was unlikely that exotic species would ever be able to grow abundantly in a place in which they hadn't evolved. The reality is that the vast majority of species exposed to a new habitat don't reproduce successfully. Occasionally, however, some populations do take hold and after a period of acclimation can increase in numbers significantly, having destructive effects on many elements of the native environment of which they've become part.
Chains of extinction
This final group is one of secondary effects. All wild populations of living things have many complex intertwining links with other living things around them. Large herbivorous animals such as the
hippopotamus have populations of
insectivorous birds that feed off the many parasitic insects that grow on the hippo. Should the hippo die out so to will these groups of birds, leading to further destruction as other species dependent on the birds are affected. Also referred to as a
Domino effect, this series of
chain reactions is by far the most destructive process that can occur in any
ecological community.
Further Information
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