Word: ecosystems
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Without trees, a tropical ecosystem turns wasteland...
...result, the entire ecosystem is completely off balance. During the past 20 years, at least 450 varieties of plants and 204 species of birds have disappeared from the region. With so many of their natural enemies gone, pests and parasites have proliferated, attacking grass, leaves and fruit. Says Farmer Franz Hummel, "Nobody even bothers to raise papaya any more-they are all full of bugs...
...answers to this defiant dilemma. But he regards Appalachia as a microcosm of America. Unless deterioration can be stopped here, we will have proved ourselves an ungoverning and ungovernable people. If greed-and-need continues to dictate, Caudill predicts, strip mines will next "demolish the West as a viable ecosystem...
...Appalled by such widespread pollution, ecologists are more determined than ever to save the nation's shorelines and estuaries. They have begun to appreciate more fully the importance of coastal areas in the complex interaction of the land, air and sea environments that make up the North American ecosystem. Coastal areas, for example, provide the habitat and food for thousands of species, many of which find their way to the dinner table. "An acre of marshland produces more protein than an acre of corn," says Edward Daly, chief of the wetlands division of the Connecticut department of agriculture...
...effects, ants will not touch food that has been doused with 2,5-dichlorophenol. Thus, the scientists concluded, the herbicide had become an effective component of the grasshopper's defense-the first known instance of an insect's using as a weapon a chemical "unleashed upon the ecosystem...