Changing the balance of an ecosystem can bring unexpected results that may prove disastrous for humans. I’m Jim Metzner, and this is the Pulse of the Planet, presented by the American Museum of Natural History.
“When you go into a landscape and transform it from a very diverse place to a monoculture agricultural system, many, many things change.”
Francesca Grifo is Co-Curator of the Hall of Biodiversity at the American Museum of Natural History.
“There are many viruses, in fact, throughout South America and some in Africa where we’ve gone in, taken grasslands, turned them into cornfields and all of a sudden, the relationships between the disease, and the microbe that causes the disease, and the vectors, which are the animals which carry the disease to humans, all being very much changed — in the numbers of them and their relative densities. One example is hunine virus which happened in Argentina, in South America. Farmers went in and planted corn, taking out the native grasses. The native grasses were very diverse. As a result of that there was a mouse that was not very common, but when the farmers went into the fields to harvest the corn, there were increased numbers of the mice there, the farmers came into contact with the mice, and it turned out that the mice were carrying this virus, hunine virus, which turned out to be one of the hemorrhagic viruses which, of course, are just horrible, dreadful diseases. The interesting thing was, for biological scientists, was that it took a very long time for them to figure out that this was going on. We knew so little about that ecosystem that people were there for many months, trapping possible organisms, possible animals that might have been a part of this mystery before they actually figured out that it was the mouse.”
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Pulse of the Planet is presented by the American Museum of Natural History. Additional funding for this series has been provided by the National Science Foundation. I’m Jim Metzner.