After two ears of the beginning of the major pandemic of modern history, some people are still uninformed. As a scientist, I feel the necessity to expand the knowledge that my professors passed to me, contributing to a major cause that correlates the emergence of epidemics and pandemics with the destruction of the natural world and loss of biodiversity.
COVID-19 is a zoonotic virus, that probably came from animals and evolved to infect humans. Its spreadability and mortality rate are shocking. Zoonotic viruses are viral infections that are shared among different organisms. Protecting species diversity is a way to protect ourselves.
I read about a famous scientist that wrote an opinion article for Yale Environment 360 that starts like this: “Conservationists argue that humans need to save species in order to save ourselves. The truth is we could survive without wild species — but they can’t survive without us, and the moral argument for protecting them and the beauty they bring to the world is overwhelming.”
And he continues: “The natural services humans actually need to fuel modern living come from microbes of decay, a few main insect pollinators, the ocean’s photosynthesizing plankton, and non-living things like water and the atmosphere.”*
Got really mad, and couldn’t understand why would this scientist want to criticize the scientific community as having a selfish interest in protecting biodiversity. This blog post allowed me to show that Carl Safina could have worded its article in a better way.
Let’s not mention the importance of all ecosystem services, and keep our focus on the pandemic. Recalling: preventing biodiversity loss is a way to protect the human society against pandemics. There is a concept called dilution effect that basically explains that since different species vary in susceptibility to viral infections, a biodiverse environment leads to low infection prevalence in hosts. Species that are not hosts, not prone to the infection, act as diluters. In contrast, monocultures of animals, specially when raised in poor conditions and closed environments, are very likely to transmit diseases. Compare a closed hen house of only one species of chicken to different variations of chickens raised in open fields. It is intuitive to say that the hen house is more likely to promote disease transmissions.
We still have, and forever will, to invest in continuous scientific research to understand the impacts of human activity in our world. Now it is a special time to turn eyes to how protecting our environment and species that surround us his deeply linked to our own health.
*You can read the full article here: https://e360.yale.edu/features/the-real-case-for-saving-species-we-dont-need-them-but-they-need-us
Anna Agazzi Migotto
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 
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