5.) Why Protecting Endangered Species is Important - Dayton S

 It is important to understand what protecting an endangered species means. It’s more than just keeping a close eye on the animal population and preventing poaching. Protecting the environment and ecosystem is just as important. This is important to note because recent actions are being taken to relieve some of the precautions set to help endangered species and to prevent endangered species despite the fact that over 16,000 species are currently are listed as threatened or endangered according to the IUCN red 

                                      

The importance of protecting a species goes more in depth than just that particular species as well. An extinct species normally causes a cascade of issues within a ecosystem. The most broad example is in the food web. To you, it may be a rodent going extinct in the Forrest. For researchers this is the loss of the main food source for a hawk well known to be in this ecosystem. Now without their main food source, their population will decline and so on. This applies globally. It also works the opposite way. In Yellowstone, wolves were poached in high volumes. Without wolves, there were no predators to check the populations of large prey, as in elk and deer. Without this the plant life began to disappear much quicker than they were being replenish. If the trend continued without outside protection efforts, almost every species would begin to deplete in the area, either seeking a new thriving environment, or starving to death due to lack of a food source.

As you can tell protecting declining populations is much more important than just saving a specific species. Everything in nature is connected in more ways than we can fathom. Tied together much like a house of cards. Though one card being removed may not make the whole house fall, but your left with a small portion of what you had built, and a large mess to clean up.

Source: Columbia Climate School