February 22, 2013
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ode to the lonely perfectionist
Perfection has a common fallacy when it comes to nature and the process of evolution. It falls into niches. Which in reality always ends up in a twist of fate to be the single most common natural source of extinction on this planet. Oddly humans seem to think that they are excluded from this strange justice of nature.
Allow me to clear a few things up regarding the concept of niches. First , most important thing to understand is they are not a fallacy of primitive organisms. what i mean is, niches are not an indicator of failed biological progression. On the contrary they are the purest expression of life’s perfection when an organism becomes singularly dependent on one.
niches are most of the time an element of ecology that is present in the environment that is not being overly exploited by the greater biomass. They spell the life and death of a species.some of them are subtle in a way .
examples of animals and their niches:
ruminating animals such as the cows and other multi-stomach creatures:
they are amazing animals. literally. when the ice age hit hard, there was very little by way of vegetation that was rich in needed sustenance. so, the ruminating animals devised this incredible multiple digestive system that can find even the trace elements in pine needles and other dead vegetation. these animals can extract the most minute amounts of food from the barest of sources. it stuns me how they managed to do this, maintaining a body temperature at more then half of the energy we require to stay warm and still are massive compared to us.
sharks:
are by far one of the most excellent designs of the progress of life.they are in a niche. requiring flesh from fresh kills. although not widely dependent on a single type of prey source, they nonetheless dominate pretty much every type of niche environmentally in the ocean.in every type of climate. but what really defines them as a niche example is the fact that they have the electromagnetic sensor nerves. it displays an important aspect of where they originated from. they were as some still are, bottom dwellers. they developed the ability to sense animals under the sand. the hammerhead, is explicitly made for this purpose. but they are not so much at a loss, provided the main source of their niche is not gone. that is coral reefs.
coral reefs demonstrate explicitly the validity of how niches can spell the beginning and the end of species. niches are extremely powerful movers in the evolutionary process.
the perfect example, is the celeocanth. an ancient fish that was recently discovered in the early 1900′s to still exist. the significance is that the fish is clearly a coral reef remnant from about 280 million years ago. the reefs it lived in died out, from probably super volcano activity messing up the environment for the reefs and they live in deep trenches now. totally displaced by the need for survival.
another less obvious example of niches and the importance of understanding them is the medical science and its approach to killing the virus/bacterial parasites and diseases in our bodies. the quest is based on the fact that most of the prevalent diseases are so complex in their niches that if we can solve the required necessity we can pretty much wipe them out. however, as a demonstration of the powerful influence of niches and their need towards the organisms survival. malaria is probably one of the best when it comes to disease.the whole host is being manipulated by the malaria to maintain an environment that it can survive in. the fever is the last part of the equation. it makes the person hotter to enable its transfer to another host.
however, humans, we have a strangely unique niche. it exists in our minds. so to speak.originally, we exploited a niche that few animals were choosing to endeavor on. when we were still quadruped and lemur like. we began to seek out the seeds and hard fruits like nuts. traveling and foraging farther away from the trees.largely because the climate was erratic, the soft fruits were not stable enough. flash freezes would destroy the fruits so we were forced out into the landscape.
the world was scary as hell back then. there was the american lion that was very big and cave bears. most of the surviving competitors had super abilities compared to us.but we had advanced social behavior. soon, this would be our saving grace. we , humans, would not exist without our ability to interact and communicate.that is our niche, without it, we would perish. you see, there is nothing else that we have. we don’t have claws, we don’t have fangs, we are not naturally violent and we cant outrun hardly anything. how did we survive? we created culture.
culture is our niche.this is radical compared to the other animals.most of them were in niches from habitat or readily available food source.
as primates we didn’t have this problem. the word primate means that we are pretty much in all ways that matter the same as the lemurs in the beginning of primates branch. we have generalized teeth and are pretty much uninhibited for movement of our limbs.
the niche of culture advanced and reinforced its necessity as strongly as the eucalyptus tree and the koala are bound. it is really all fascinating.bats,snakes,ants,birds (even more specific examples exist in birds), kangaroos, fresh water fish versus salt water and even buzzards are examples of animals that are contained in niches.
and so…. it remains to be seen. will we make it? it is hard to say, the mind or source of the niche is not exactly physically bound. so it remains to be seen if we humans can actually out live and out mode our niche.