3 ms·
You mean like the untold number of bacterial and viral infections with the ability to kill their hosts? Plenty of animals and plants alter their environment to
by hannasanarion 8y ago
You mean like the untold number of bacterial and viral infections with the ability to kill their hosts?
Plenty of animals and plants alter their environment to the detrinent of others.
Trees are tall and shady in order to reduce the sunlight in the environment and starve nearby plants to death at absurd individual expense: it takes a lot of nutrients to make those trunks that serve no purpose other than spite.
Beavers construct big dams to turn meadows into swampland, often clearing out the local plant life. I know from personal experience that operating a large farm in a wooded area is a constant battle of construction and destruction against the beavers.
Yeah, humans are better at altering the environment than most everything else, but altering the environment at the expense of other life is hardly unnatural.
- Turing_Machine 8y ago> Plenty of animals and plants alter their environment to the detriment of others. Definite case in point: photosynthesizing organisms (green plants, algae, etc.) We know that the Earth had a large-scale anaerobic ecosystem before the advent of photosynthesis. While anaerobic organisms still exist, they're only found in very narrow niches. >99% of them were wiped out, root and branch, apparently killed off by rising oxygen levels (oxygen is a poison to them).