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Biodiversity - Coggle Diagram

- - - - Gould - Everything is up to to chance/ luck and there was a low chance that life would be a success and very unlikely to be repeatable,
      - Conway-Morris - If it was repeated it would be the same, the best designs always succeed
    - - Cambrian - Major groups appear (eg jawless fish and marine plants) and then stabilise
      - Ordovician to Permian has a huge increase in biodiversity that stabilises, in Ordovician jawed bony fish appear, then land plants in Silurian then amphibians and insects in Devonian and then forests and reptiles in Carboniferous
      - In Permian there was a biodiversity crash, trilobites went extinct, mammal-like reptiles appeared and the end of Paleozoic (early life) (Cambrian - Permian)
      - Metazoic era began (middle life) (Triassic - Cretaceous), Triassic involved shell breaking predators, sediment movers, and ruling reptiles (and dinosaurs), Jurassic was the age of ruling reptiles and then in the Cretaceous period ichthyosaurs, plesiosaurs, mesosaurs and ammonites went extinct as well as dinosaurs and flying reptiles so this ended with a biodiversity crash
      - Cenozoic era (Paleogene - now), biodiversity exponentially increases, in Paleogene mammals appeared and flowering plants (angiosperms), in Neogene and Quaternary insects, molluscs, fish and humans and finally Anthropocene the age of humans and decline of biodiversity
  - - - Use value - can be direct or indirect and includes ecosystem function
        
        Direct use is the direct role of biological resources in consumption or production, this varies a lot
        
        Biological control, herbicides and pesticides reduce the increase of wasps and weeds
        
        Industrial materials - made from natural sources like dyes, rubber, wood etc, also biomimicry has been used for inventing products in industry for example termite mounds inspired air conditioning and burdock seeds inspired velcro
        
        Medicine - a lot of the world rely on plant based medicine, around half of drugs have natural origins eg Pacific yew contains taxol which is an anti-cancer drug and some animals have been able to produce toxins that can be used as medicine too
        
        Recreation - nature is harvested and hunted for recreation for example gardening, fishing, displays like botanical gardens or zoos
        
        Food - half habitable land used for agriculture which is 95% of all plant/ animal protein sources, nearly all energy is consumed by humans and 1 billion people depend on wild food, several flowering plants are considered edible eg rice, beans, wheat etc, and make up 3/4 of the food supply, animals are also used as a food source eg insects, crustaceans, echinoderms and vertebrates however they are hard to keep track of
        
        Ecotourism - a lot of money is made on ecotourism as people travel to see different protected areas however this can be disruptive if people don't respect what they visit
        
        Indirect-use is when we use it but it's not marketable and is crucial for survival
        
        Examples: atmosphere, hydrological and climate regulation, nutrient cycles, pest control, photosynthesis, pollination and soil formation
        
        Indirect use involves ecosystem services like the examples above and bees which carry out pollination
        
        Ecosystem services haven't been able to be provided by humans but we couldn't afford it anyway
        
        Attempts have been made to provide ecosystem services on a smaller scale for example fish tanks with a balanced ecosystem, there was also an experiment called biosphere ii which was a smaller scale area that was made to be self running but it failed
        
        Greater species richness increases species redundancy (minimum species needed) and resilience of ecosystem to function through time, rivet popping increases (loss of few species). In this case there are unpredictable effects due to the variation oof species roles
      - Non use - includes option, bequest, existence/ intrinsic
        
        Option value - retaining biodiversity for options for the future use and non use, protecting species as in the future they may hold a lot of value/ use
        
        Bequest - Locke suggested each generation should bequeath enough for future generations so they can survive
        
        Intrinsic value - organisms have worth without being used, some have been worshipped, cared for and admired there are many tales of animals like finding nemo, Wilson called this value of live biophilia as we have empathy of other beings
  - - - Aristotle studied animals (384-322 B.C.E.) and Theophrastus studied plants (370-286 B.C.E.)
      - Aristotle looked into the great chain of being (God at the top then angel etc) he looked for things that had no blood and put them lower eg plants
      - Linnaeus found the hierarchical classification of life (Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus and species), Linnaeus did this purely on how the organisms looked
      - Darwin's theory of evolution shows a relationship (late 1800s/ early 1900s) and the tree of life
      - 1960s - Whittaker suggested there are 5 kingdoms that are related to each other and saw microscopic life as basic and macroscopic as more complex
      - 1970s - Woese classify organisms based off molecules like DNA and started the 5 kingdoms vs 3 domains debate
      - Years later of technological advances a computer made the 3 domain model
      - Different groups can share DNA
  - - - Megafauna disappeared the same time humans arrived, this could be due to human predation, habitat destruction, the hyperdisease hypothesis (the wildlife caught human diseases and died to the point of extinction) and/ or climate change
      - There are two types of extinct, extinct (no reasonable double the last individual has died) and extinct in the wild (surveys have failed to record the individual so it's assumed extinct but may still be alive somewhere)
      - Extinctions are rapidly increasing and the data shown is an underestimate as it focuses on birds and mammals
      - Extinction debt - when a resource is exploited past self sustaining numbers resulting in a future extinction but no death yet but it will happen
      - Many species populations are dropping but aren't extinct yet
    - - Hunting/ exploiting population until the population can't recover eg fuelwood, bushmeat and fisheries which can lead to further impacts like how the ecosystem works when the exploited species goes extinct/ decreases, the bycatch involved and the destruction when the species are being exploited eg trawling and lost nets
    - - Habitats are distributed and can be manmade, many forests, grasslands etc have decreased, this can be due to directly destroying the habitat, climate change or the pollution that takes over the habitat making it unliveable
    - - Introducing a non-domesticated species (can be accidental) resulting in predating and/ or outcompeting native wildlife
    - - Extinction of one species leads to extinction of others eg the prey goes extinct so the predator starves and goes extinct
    - - Humans are the cause of all of this
      - As humanity increases species richness increase until it reaches a certain point and then decreases at the same rate it increased
      - In the last 200 years there has been a dramatic increase in humanity
      - Humans decreased primary production of terrestrial aquatic areas
      - Power consumption increase a lot
      - Water used for humanity and not nature
      - The Earth is using 2 Earths worth of resources but there's still a chance to reduce the resource use
  - - - From a convention biodiversity was defined as the variability among living organisms from all sources including inter alia, terrestrial, marine and other aquatic ecosystems and the ecological complexes of which they are a part of
        
        The company that ran the convention was biased >:(
        
        Biodiversity is the variety of life in all its forms
  - - - Objectives
        
        Use components sustainably
        
        Benefits from genetic resources are shared equitably to avoid exploitation of developing countries
        
        Conserve biological diversity
      - Measures
        
        Nations must develop and implement strategies, plans and programmes and if they are effective they become prioritised/ essential policies in areas of how the nation runs like agriculture
        
        From this biodiversity action plans (BAPs) were made to show what is to be done and who does it, however most of these plans are merely aspirations and usually fail to be met
      - Identification and monitoring
        
        Looking to see if the plans are appropriate and effective in benefitting conservation and sustainability
      - In-situ conservation (protecting species within their natural habitat)
        
        Protected areas are created however a lot of them are quite small and tend to be biased to areas with low economic value and the areas are more designated than protected
        
        Wider area must be provided for the protected areas as they are too small and threats can enter however this is expensive
        
        Rehabilitation of damaged ecosystems
        
        Taking actions against destructive factors by managing then more
        
        Minimise conflict of conservation and the use of the area
        
        Recognise resources aren't evenly distributed and that poorer countries and communities will need support as it directly effects them as they lose land and food sources and don't have the money to get more resources
      - Ex-situ conservation (protecting species outside their natural environment)
        
        Culture collections
        
        Artificial propagation of plants
        
        Seed banks
        
        Captive breeding of animals, in some cases there are more species in captivity than the wild and there's a debate on the ethics
        
        Sperm/ ova banks
      - Sustainable use of components
        
        Human exploitation is greater than Earths productivity so debates about trades between countries have been proposed however it requires local support
      - Incentive measures
        
        To get economically and socially sound measures that act as incentives for conservation
    - - Many countries made BAPs but never implemented them
      - A world summit on sustainable development happened in 2002 and they came up with the targets to halve the proportion of people without sanitation, produce chemicals that don't harm the environment, maintain fish stocks and reduce biodiversity loss
      - By 2005 2/3 of the worlds ecosystems were destroyed/ degraded
      - By 2015 more targets were made combating world hunger and to improve human health, marine protected areas were also a topic/ target
      - Not much was achieved :/
      - COP15 (2022) goals for protecting 30% of Earths land and waters and to halve food waste
      - COP16 (2024) including indigenous people in conservation decisions, no agreements made, people left early
      - COP28 (2023) didn't focus on emissions
      - COP29 (2024) finance orientated to help developing countries
- - - - Domain categories were changed over time Linnaeus first thought it was Vegetabilia and Animalia, Haeckel thought it was Protista, Plantae and Animalia, currently since 1990 it's been Bacteria, Archaea and Eukarya (Woese)
    - - Hydrothermal vents create gas like H2, CO2, N2 and H2S from tiny pores/ compartments, then release energy in the form of H2 and H2S, the compartments could have produced chemical gradients , this is like proton gradients in membranes, the hydrothermal vents release hot, nutrient rich water this was the perfect environment for sugars and other molecules to form to form
        
        RNA is theorised to be the first self replicating molecules as they can be catalytic, but then after some time the proteins took over in the catalytic role (enzymes), DNA then took over the role of coding information as it's more stable
        
        The synthesis of phospholipid vesicles enclosed the replication and replication and replication forming LUCA, after this natural selection produced 2 lineages (different physiochemically), Bacteria and Archaea
        
        Overall: Primordial soup -> protein and RNA -> self replicating RNA -> RNA in membrane -> protein and RNA in membrane -> DNA replace RNA
  - - - eg Diatoms are diverse microalgae (>10000 species), they play a big role in marine productivity and are enclosed in a frustule (shell-like structure made from silica (SiO2))
      - eg Phaeophytes are macroalgae and are brown algae
      - eg Oomycetes are parasitic
    - - Haptophytes are mainly marine and photosynthetic phytoplankton and tend to form blooms, they heavily influence oceanic and atmospheric processes, they are covered in plates of calcium carbonate called coccoliths
      - Centrohelids are usually in freshwater and radiate pseudopodia
    - - Green algae lead to land plants
      - Red algae can be found in many seaweed species
      - Glaucophytes are cyanoplasts which contain peptidoglycan
    - - Aplicomplexans are unicellular eukaryotic parasites of other eukaryotes
      - Dinoflagellates are heterotrophic and thecate (cup-like), they extend a pseudopodial pallium to surround large prey and excrete digestive enzymes as they themselves cannot increase in volume to engulf prey
      - Ciliates have cilia in at least one life cycle stage, they beat the cilia to create water currents that move food into the cell, there are >8000 species and they have a major role in the microbial loop as they ingest smaller flagellates and bacteria and can be ingested by larger organisms, they are found in water columns
    - - Formaminiferans are studied a lot as they're good at describing diversity
      - Acanthareans
    - - Can be unicellular and multicellular
      - Can be protists (choanoflagellates), animals or fungi
      - Have a singular posterior flagellum at one of their life stages
      - Chytridiomycota (Chytrids) have characteristics from the last common ancestor of animals
        
        Some produce rhizoids
        
        They have two trophic modes, parasites and saprotrophs
        
        It has a unicellular body and a cell wall that matures into a sporangium where uniflagellate zoospores develop, once developed the zoospores swim to a new attachment site and develop a new sporangium
        
        They can be parasites to algae and infect diatoms
        
        They produce substrates others cannot and the zoospores are fed on by zooplankton
      - Dikarya have ecological roles like symbioses, parasites, saprotrophs and pathogens
- - - - Caecilians, salamanders have internal fertilisation, caecilians have intromittent organs, salamanders lay spermatophores and dance/ court and release pheromones
      - Kleptogenesis females use sperm from a related species, the sperm is discarded but the eggs develop asexually, sometimes some of the sperm genome makes it
      - Paedomorphosis (neoteny) is when juvenile traits are retained in adults, usually when terrestrial conditions are poor
      - Anurans use external fertilisation, sometimes internal fertilisation can happen but it's rare and there's no tadpole stage, the yolk nourishes the larvae an the larvae cling to the frogs back
  - - - Weight (down)
      - Lift (up)
      - Thrust (forward)
      - Drag (backward)
      - Drag is minimised by streamlining
      - Thrust is made by wing flapping
      - Flight either evolved by running to flying, or going down from a high place
    - - Catch flying prey
      - Movement from place to place
      - Escape predators
      - Unlock more niches
      - Legs used as weapons
    - - Lots of energy
      - Constrains body size and morphology
      - Flight lost in some birds
- - - - Arthropods have an intermediate body size out of all organisms, there are more ecological niches for them, the benefit of having an intermediate size is that it avoids the lack of speciation resulting in more variation so a higher change of survival
      - Cuticles provide skeletal support, it's impermeable to water and it's flexible, so arthropods can survive on land, in wet conditions and can modify themselves
      - Morphology (bauplan) undergoes tagmosis (specialises to the region) and have tagmata (body regions)
  - - - There are 67000 species and some to be discovered
      - All crustaceans have a 5 segmented head with has 2 pairs of antennae, mandibles and maxillae, a trunk region (middle area usually split in 2 tagmata (thorax and abdomen)), biramous limbs (two branches), carapace/ cephalic shield and nauplius larva (one eye, 3 pairs of appendages) sometimes this larva is suppressed in direct development
      - They vary in diversity of segments in terms of number, form, use and morphology this is due to variation in homeotic gene which is linked to anatomy, morphology also varies in development (ontogeny)
    - - Hexapods include insects and others, they have 3 pairs of walking limbs and 3 tagmata (head, thorax and abdomen), they originated from the Devonian period (390 mya) and to this day dominate with 950000 extant species and more getting discovered yearly, they are also very abundant
      - There are many variations and orders, they differentiate in whether their mouthparts are enclosed (entognatha) or not,
      - Hexapods usually live in highly humid soils
      - They have the advantage of body size, cuticle and flexible bauplan because they're arthropods however there are some traits more specific to hexapods and they are flying (most insects fly and it is successful in their environment, wings are leg exites, the leg segment fuses in the body wall and then the winds stick out from the body) and metamorphosis
        
        Metamorphosis has 3 types ametabolous (juveniles are mini adults), hemimetabolous (incomplete metamorphosis wings and sexual structures yet to be developed) and holometabolous (full metamorphosis, adults and young have different niches and live in different areas, it usually involves a pupa stage, they have imaginal discs are on pupa and are where tissue will grow to form body parts, this this to be common among insects, the juvenile form prevents wing damage)
      - Size is limited due to its respiratory system, the larger the insect the longer the oxygen diffusion, this would explain why insects were larger when there were higher oxygen levels
    - - Cheliceriformes are spiders, scorpions etc, they can have a slightly interior exoskeleton, they have a body made of two tagmata (prosoma (cephalothorax) and opisthosoma (abdomen)), they have no antennae, they have chelicerae (fangs) and pedipalps, they are mainly terrestrial speciation happens on land we see this because horseshoe crabs aren't terrestrial and haven't changed for years, they originated from the Cambrian period
      - Male scorpions produce spermatophores which contain sperm that internally reproduces with the female, many female cheliceriforme females are larger than males, the males have to convince the females that they are a mate and not food, they can do this by presenting a nuptial gift which is food for the female to invest them for mating, some male spiders spin webs with hormones to mate with the female and they have pedipalps modified for sperm transfer, the pedipalps have coiled ends so it penetrates the females, scorpion chelae are also pedipalps
      - One advantage of spiders is their ability to produce strong, elastic silk, it is a fibrous protein that is produced as a liquid from the spinnerets at the end of the abdomen, some spiders made communal webs to catch larger prey, webs are used as living spaces and they can be used as oxygen storage for spiders that go underwater
      - Distribution shows the separation of land
    - - Has 4 groups, Chilopoda (eg centipedes, on pair of legs a segment, venomous, usually predatory, have rapid gait (leg movement) compound eyes (separate from body), legs aren't always the same length, segments can overlap, some have tracheal lungs and glue glands for defence), Diplopoda (eg millipedes, detritivores, burrowers (use dorsal plate as battering ram), have 2 pairs of limbs per segment, can be pill millipedes), Pauropoda and Symphyla
      - Mainly terrestrial, originated from Cambrian period
      - Two types, opistogoneate (reproductive parts on lower body) and progoneate (reproductive parts at higher body)