"Thinking Like A Mountain"

          What do wolves and the forest have in common? If you try to remove it, everything else will become unbalanced and will fall apart. A mountain has a very balanced ecosystem, and if something is added or removed, it creates havoc. Even though mountains can't really talk, or even think, they are more intelligent then the human race.
          This story was about how the mountains need everything, but the ranchers were ruining the mountain. They started to kill off the mountain lions so the lions wouldn't touch their cattle. But then, with the receding mountain lion population the deer began to over-populate and kill the mountain. The deer were eating all the plants, and the mountain couldn't recuperate to the growing number of deer. But it was more artistic value to it, it was very well written.
         This has changed my perspective on the ecosystem and deforestation. I didn't realize how much taking away just one thing from the habitat it can completely ruin it. Even if someone thinks that there are plenty of the species, and starts hunting them or takes them out of the ecosystem, then something will go wrong. For example, if the bunny would eat only one type of grass, but then an epidemic comes and takes out the grass then the bunny will starve and then whatever eats the bunny will have some problems trying to find other food to eat. It is a chain reaction, or a domino effect.
         

TED Talk : "The Oceans Glory-- And Horror" by Brian Skerry

So on Friday August 29th, in Biology, we were told to go onto www.ted.com/talks and were told to search for certain key words. I am very into animals and want to learn more about the ocean and it's creatures.

The TED talk was about a photographer, who worked for National Geographic, and how his pictures would try to capture the readers eyes. He had been photographing for the past thirty years, and he mainly jumped into the water because he wanted people to know what was happening in the deep ocean blue. Brian doesn't just take the usual 'clear blue ocean water with fish' but also sharks caught in nets, whales with rope scars around it's tail. He was showing the truth.

He said that this shark caught in the net looked almost like a sacrifice, with the fins out-stretched and her eye still visible. Brian told the crowd that 100 million sharks are killed yearly, while only, on average 100 humans are in a shark attack. Also, the hammerhead shark population has decreased by 80% in the past thirty years.

From this video, I realized that if we don't take care of the resources that we have now, we might never get them again. Such as coral reefs, with more and more people vacationing or building on the islands, all the chemicals and garbage washes down to the ocean, and slowly kills the ecosystem. But when we protect the habitat, life will come back to it. All in all, we need to protect our Earth and our resources.