"It's hard to imagine the disappearance of a bird species making much difference to human well-being," said Daily, an associate professor (research) in Stanford's Department of Biological Sciences and director of the CCB Tropical Research Program. "Yet consider the case of the passenger pigeon. Besides mail becoming a lot less fun to receive, its loss is thought to have made Lyme disease the huge problem it is today. When passenger pigeons were abundant-and they used to occur in unimaginably large flocks of hundreds of millions of birds-the acorns on which they specialized would have been too scarce to support large populations of deer mice, the main reservoir of Lyme disease, that thrive on them today."
Scavengers and insectivores
More than a third of all scavengers and fish-eaters are extinction-prone, according to the study, yet little is known about the potential consequences of their widespread disappearance. "Since most scavenging birds are highly specialized to rapidly dispose of the bodies of large animals, these birds are important in the recycling of nutrients, leading other scavengers to dead animals and limiting the spread of diseases to human communities as a result of slowly decomposing carcasses," the authors wrote.
As an example, the researchers pointed to India, where the collapse of the vulture population in the 1990s was followed by an explosion of rabid feral dogs and rats. In 1997 alone, more than 30,000 people died of rabies in India, more than half of the world's total rabies deaths that year.
Insect control is another important ecosystem service performed by birds, yet the study found that more insect-eating bird species are prone to extinct
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Contact: Mark Shwartz
mshwartz@stanford.edu
650-723-9296
Stanford University
13-Dec-2004