India. The vultures disappear, dogs are scarce and rabies are growing, leopards are attacking humans. What is happening ?
In the 1980s in India, the population of the eastern vulture with a white back was so large that it was considered the most common bird of prey. In recent years the vultures began mysteriously and rapidly to disappear due to a renal disease with outbreaks in both Pakistan and Nepal. So a population that was a million or so, has dropped by 99%.
In 2004, after much research on what caused their death, the answer to the mystery was given. The cause was a drug that the vets gave to sick aged cattle as a painkiller, anti-inflammatory, diclofenac. The vultures that eaten the deer of the dead animals that were given diclofenac were given it through the food, and that was the cause of the renal dysfunction that led them to death .
The vultures perform a huge task on the equilibrium of the ecosystem as they consume dead animals, preventing the spread of germs and viruses. After their disappearance, the gap had to be covered by wild dogs, as a result, that their population increased and another chain reaction started. The cases of rabies have begun to rise.
Since 2006, diclofenac has been banned in India and then in Nepal, Pakistan and Bangladesh, and its percentages have fallen sharply. However, the ecosystem has been severely disrupted. The Ministry of the Environment and Forestry, in collaboration with bird protection organizations, has undertaken the rearing of vultures in a controlled environment so as to release them in 2015, hoping at some point that the new birds will survive and their population will recover again.
Why are leopards attacking people?
The increase in the population of the people made them trample many areas in which the leopard lived, thus significantly reducing its hunting and prey. The leopard found in this new situation a very easy prey, the dogs. The dogs at the view of the hunter animal did not react, making it even easier to hunt them. Thus, the best friend of man became a burden, and the inhabitants of these regions were trying to persecute them in order not to attract leopards. So, leopards sometimes not finding other animals to consume could even attack humans.
Every year people produce 288 million tones of plastic, which is almost one tone less than our annual production of vegetables. As 0.1% of this vast amount ends at sea, it has a huge impact on the aquatic world.
The apparent results are the tip of the iceberg. Plastic waste we see on the beaches. Sea turtles eat plastic bags because they confuse them with jellyfish. In Hawaii, the albatrosses eat and feed their babies with plastics floating in the sea. Although adult birds can smash them, the younger cannot and often are dead of starvation, with their stomachs filled with plastic lids and other rubbish .
The problem with tiny plastics:
They feed on plastic instead of zooplankton. An enormous problem is that they create plastics residues that do not exceed 2.5 mm in the size of the zooplankton and are everywhere. Indeed, in some areas of the Central Pacific is six times more than the zooplankton. Naturally, birds and fish that feed on zooplankton cannot distinguish them. Like color plastics that confuse them with krill, a zooplankton population.
They carry pathogens
Also, plastic waste that in addition to the seas can be used by pathogenic bacteria such as cholera, or by the marine insect sea skaters, which needs a surface to lay its eggs. Since the plastics are durable they are an ideal means of preserving and propagating such harmful species. Plastics of a smaller size (pico & nano), the majority of zooplankton, derived from products containing nanoparticles and microspheres, create a new problem.
Although we do not know how these nanoparticles interact with marine fauna, we know they are absorbed at the cellular level. The worst is that they are designed for that reason! As drug carriers to transfer organic molecules to targeted cells.
For example, estradiol, the drug used in fertilization techniques, ends up through sewage at sea. As with dozens of other harmful chemicals, they can be more effective on the surface of plastics. The result is the disruption of the endocrine and reproductive system of marine organisms.
So we see that plastics do not just accumulate. They cause chain reactions that can damage marine ecosystems. Contamination of the seas is the least studied case of infection and that's why we have to bring it to the fore.
info: bioximikos
photos: google