Essay - The Term 'Endangered Species' Means Any Species Which Is in...

The term 'endangered species' means any species which is in danger of ext*****ction throughout all or a significant portion of its range other than a species of the Class Insect a de*****ined by ***** Secretary to constitute a pest whose protection under the provisions of this Act would present ********** overwhelming and overriding risk ***** man." A threatened ***** "means ***** species which is likely to become an end*****gered species within the foreseeable future throughout all or a ***** portion of its range." (The Endangered Species Act of 1973)

People can go into the moral ***** ethical concerns about ending any evolutionary line that goes back 3.5 billion years (as does our own), some confuse ***** endangered ***** with the operative phr*****e 'no practical use to hu*****s.' What it really means is something more like 'no known practical use given ***** current state ***** knowledge.' (Lovejoy)

The Pacific Yew is an example of such a confusion as it used to be considered as a g*****rbage tree until taxol, a compound found in its bark, was d*****covered to be a powerful drug aga*****st ovarian, lung and other cancers. A bacterium ***** lives in the Yellowstone hot springs is another example. It was discovered that ***** bacterium had an enzyme that that drives the polymerase chain reaction, a biochemic*****l process that won ***** Nobel Prize in 1993 and that is now responsible for billions of dollars of economic activity annually. Previously the notion was held that th***** ***** a useless object. The po*****t here is ***** like books in a library, species have value (some of it practical) that may become apparent only when they are studied closely. (*****)

Every organism, even if or not it has evident practical use to humans, has a functional role in its habitat or ecosystem. Though for many *****, these niches appear to be trivial (in terms ***** total biomass, numerical abundance or relative role ***** ecosystem metabolism), it should be kept in mind that the ***** effects of various organisms in biological systems are seldom static, and minor species can sometimes become very important as systems fluctuate. Each species also represents a unique genetic library. Our genetic technology is only beginning to tap the vast potential benefits of ***** libraries, ***** seemingly 'minor' ***** are typically the most specialized organisms; we can expect that ecological specialists will often turn out to have ***** most unusual genes and hence represent potential resources that we ***** preserve for our ***** needs. (Clark)

*****, minor species often have functions that we ***** not underst***** but that may be *****ly or evolutionarily imp*****tant, often involving complex interactions of ***** other *****, some of which may in ***** ***** ecologically or commercially important. ***** dodo and the Carolina parakeet were important dispersers ***** seeds, ***** their loss has permanently affected forest structure in their habitats; rare insects are often highly specific pollina*****rs ***** loss affects the reproduction and survival of other plants. On ***** time scales, we know far less