Introduced Species and Habitat Fragmentation
Humans have been introducing species world wide to environments for a long time both directly such as establishing a population to be used as a biological control and indirectly such as accidental escapes of individuals out of agriculture. This causes drastic global effects on various populations with hybridization being one of the reasons introduced species can be so detrimental. When habitats become broken apart, one of two things can occur, genetically speaking. The first is that populations that were once connected can be cut off from one another, preventing their genes from interacting. Occasionally, this will result in a population of one species breeding with a population of another species as a means of surviving such as the case with the red wolves. Their population numbers being so small, they needed another means of survival. Habitat fragmentation also led to the influx of generalist species into areas where they would not have been, leading to competition and in some cases interbreeding/incorporation of a population into another. In this way, habitat fragmentation is essentially an indirect method of introducing species to an area.
Read more about this topic: Mammal Hybrids, Hybrids in Nature, Anthropogenic Hybridization
Famous quotes containing the words introduced, species and/or habitat:
“The medium is the message. This is merely to say that the personal and social consequences of any medium—that is, of any extension of ourselves—result from the new scale that is introduced into our affairs by each extension of ourselves, or by any new technology.”
—Marshall McLuhan (1911–1980)
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—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Neither moral relations nor the moral law can swing in vacuo. Their only habitat can be a mind which feels them; and no world composed of merely physical facts can possibly be a world to which ethical propositions apply.”
—William James (1842–1910)