Southern Sea Otter Extinction

1. If the southern sea otter became extinct primarily because of human activities, it would be unethical and people could no longer be able to look at these appealing and highly intelligent animals as they play in the water resulting in the loss of millions of dollars a year in tourism revenues. Also, sea urchins and other kelp eating species would probably destroy the Pacific coast kelp forests and much of the rich biodiversity they support. I would do the following three things to help prevent the extinction of this species. First, I would become a member or donate money to an organization that works to protect sea urchins. Second, I would to tell the government to issue a statement to prevent the hunting of this species. Third, I would have

Predators are generally less abundant than their prey because they are usually found at high trophic levels due to the fact that they eat organisms high up on the food chain. This relates to the second law of thermodynamics because some energy is degraded and lost in the form of heat when energy is converted through each trophic level. 90% of the usable chemical energy is lost when transferred so there is a low amount of energy as well as biomass at lower trophic levels and a high amount of energy as well as biomass at higher trophic levels where predators are located.

3. I would tell them that we need to worry about the effects that human activities have on natural systems. Ecological succession can be able to heal the wounds of such activities and restore the balance of nature, but the process could take as long as hundreds or thousands of years to occur. It will not occur fast enough to heal all the wounds and restore the balance of nature in time.

4. I would tell them that just because nature is unpredictable, that does not mean that we should stop efforts to preserve natural systems. There are natural instances that can occur in the environment and hurt it so there is no reason for humans to start hurting natural systems even more by stopping our preservation efforts. Without our preservation efforts, nature will be disturbed even more so humans should allow natural processes to

Three factors that have limited human population growth in the past and that we have overcome are disease, low food productivity, and less landscape. We overcame disease by discovering several antibiotics. We overcame low food productivity by using technology, expanding agriculture, and controlling populations that compete for our resources. We overcame less landscape by using large amounts of energy and matter resources to occupy formerly uninhabitable areas. Two factors that may limit human population growth in the future are more diseases and less available water. I think we are close to reaching these limits because recent diseases have been discovered that cannot be cured. Also, studies have proven that in 15 years, half of humans will live in areas with high water stress