|
Post by Exalt on Feb 3, 2024 7:40:03 GMT 5
How necessary/beneficial are large animals for ecosystems?
|
|
|
Post by Infinity Blade on Feb 5, 2024 17:29:03 GMT 5
How necessary/beneficial are large animals for ecosystems? Places with comparatively few if any large animals do exist. Island ecosystems come to mind, as do places in Western countries where a lot of the local fauna has been wiped out (where I live, for instance, the largest animal around is arguably the white-tailed deer, although it's highly questionable how healthy the ecosystem is). Large animals can certainly be important keystone species, though. Here's one example.
|
|
|
Post by Exalt on Feb 5, 2024 21:39:23 GMT 5
I guess what I'm going for here is that long term, it feels like being small is the way to survive, as a species, so I was pondering bigger picture benefits.
|
|
|
Post by Infinity Blade on Feb 6, 2024 4:03:18 GMT 5
I guess what I'm going for here is that long term, it feels like being small is the way to survive, as a species, so I was pondering bigger picture benefits. Well, that makes sense. Smaller animals need less food, can take shelter better, are more common, and often reproduce at quick rates. So at any given moment, even if there aren't any big animals around, you can get on there still being small animals (think the aftermath of the K-Pg). But then some of those small animals evolve to become large, and those large animals can provide benefits to other lifeforms in the ecosystem. The big picture benefit is really to the benefit of the animals that grow large (because being large is evidently useful to them). The benefits they then provide to the rest of the ecosystem is a side-effect, I think.
|
|
|
Post by Exalt on Apr 26, 2024 22:43:47 GMT 5
Are there any ideas on how involved non-avian dinosaur fathers were?
|
|
|
Post by Infinity Blade on Apr 27, 2024 15:22:32 GMT 5
That would depend a lot on how involved the parents in general were, which likely varied within the non-avian dinosaur groups.
|
|
|
Post by Exalt on Apr 28, 2024 9:53:46 GMT 5
I may have gotten ahead of myself there, yeah. Sauropods seem to generally be depicted as not being present parents, likely due to the sheer size gap.
|
|