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All animals influence the environment to varying extents. The production of livestock and poultry has marked impacts on the environment influencing water, air, and soil. Manure or animal waste is the predominant source of concern particularly with intensive animal agriculture.
Animals play an essential role in maintaining a healthy environment. Among other ways, they help with pollination, pest control, and climate control. Read on for just a sampling of some interesting ways that animals support the environment that we enjoy.
Elephants are the world's largest and most powerful land animals, so it's not surprising they have a profound impact on the ecosystem. To reach food, elephants regularly break branches, uproot bushes, and push down whole trees—sometimes several trees next to each other.
Animals play a much larger role in maintaining a healthy environment than they are often given credit for. The loss of just one species can have a ripple effect on entire ecosystems causing irreparable damage that can often go unpredicted. For example, a plant-eating insect going extinct means that the plant populations that it once controlled can grow rampant and choke out other plant species. The animals who depended on the other plants for food or shelter in turn do not have enough food and are at risk of extinction themselves.
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Scientists have discovered that bats can eat up to 1,000 insects in an hour. Just one colony of Mexican free-tailed bats in Texas consisting of 20 million bats is capable of eating 220 tons (or 55 elephants worth) of insects in a single night! Bat species play a vital role in maintaining insect populations and helping to control pest populations, such as mosquitoes. This role is perhaps most important to the agricultural sector where insects can cause disease in animals and destroy crops. The value that bats supply for the agricultural industry in the role that they play in pest control has been estimated to be over 3.7 billion a year in North America alone.
Beaver dams and the ponds that they create help to keep the soil moist and green vegetation alive. These traits in turn help to prevent wildfires even in droughts. Every year wildfires account for between 5 and 10 percent of CO2 emissions. The more fires can be prevented the less CO2 will be emitted into the atmosphere.
The wetlands created by beaver dams also hold an astounding amount of carbon dioxide. The existing beaver ponds store an estimated 470,000 tons of carbon a year. In addition to the positive impact that they have on the environment, beaver dams also play a critical role for other wildlife, as they provide a reliable source of water.
Bees and other pollinating insects play a critical role in the food chain. In fact, bees may play a direct role in one out of every three bites of food we eat. The tiny insects are capable of this feat, as they spend most of their lives collecting pollen. An individual bee tends to focus on one species of flower when collecting pollen meaning that they are likely to spread pollen from one plant to another of the same species. In addition to the essential role that bees play in agriculture, their activity also supports the pollination of a variety of wild plant species. The roles that birds play in supporting nature and the environment are numerous. They perform pest control by eating insects, certain species act as nature’s clean-up crew by eating carcasses, and they even contribute to plant growth and protect against erosion by burying seeds that will grow into trees with roots that anchor the soil. Birds also support economies, as their beauty is enough to draw tourists from around the world.
