One of the most used expressions talking about certain animals is “architects of the planet“: Think of the beavers who change the course of the rivers with their dams, but also to the termites whose lairs are visible from space, or to the worms that shape the subsoil.
But how many architects are, and how much they work every year? The answer is in a study published on Pnaswhich for the first time collects all those species that contribute to changing the face of the planet with their business under a single umbrella – and there are many.
Animals of all kinds. “Many” in the sense of “hundreds”: the study identifies 603 between speciesgenres and families that somehow influence all those processes that modify the earth’s surface. There are all dimensions: From ants, which by building anti -movement and oxygenates the soil, to the salmon, whose presence can change the shape of a river bed.
The first thing you notice by observing the list is that the architects of the planet are very different from a biological point of view: insects, mammals, fish, birds, reptiles … and the second thing that jumps to the eye is that more than A third of these species live in fresh water environmentswhich cover just 2.4% of the earth’s surface.
How much do the architects work? The study then makes an energy estimate of the “work” of architects: it reads that every year animals contribute to surface processes with 76,000 Gigajouule of energy – The equivalent of thousands of floods. The figure, however, could be underestimated, because there are many regions of the world of which we do not know enough.
Finally, there is the usual problem: 30% of the identified species are rarethreatens of extinction or endemic of a single area. This means that, if they were to extinguish, many ecosystems could be suddenly deprived of essential services: the consequences of this lack are still unpronounceable, but there is no doubt that they would be catastrophic.
