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:
“I believe if we introduced the Lord’s Prayer here, senators would propose a large number of amendments to it.”
—Henry Wilson (1812–1875)
“A man, to be greatly good, must imagine intensely and comprehensively; he must put himself in the place of another and of many others; the pains and pleasures of his species must become his own.”
—Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
“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)