Word: ecosystems
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Almost 10% of the wildlife on the tiny raised atoll of Aldabra, 400 miles east of Africa, can be found nowhere else on earth. Owing to its isolation, Al-dabra's ecosystem has remained unique. Soaring with 7-ft. wingspreads at altitudes of more than half a mile, hundreds of thousands of frigate birds, which use Aldabra as their major Indian Ocean nesting site, blot out the rays of the sun. Thousands of rare giant land tortoises, some 4-ft. across and weighing as much as 600 Ibs., creep across the pitted coral and ridged limestone surface...
...establish an airstrip on Aldabra would require dredging and damming the atoll's 18-mile-long lagoon, creating a harbor and building a 13-mile causeway from the harbor to the airstrip. Such an invasion of bulldozers, concrete mixers and men, said the scientists, would irreversibly damage the ecosystem of the island. They added that the frigate birds would constitute one of the worst aircraft-collision haz ards in the world. The frigate is a sea bird that spends its adolescent years far from the island, returning to mate only after it is mature. Each year, a new crop...