Mary Fisher wrote:
"Jeff Layman" wrote in message

That includes good invertebrates as well as bad.

Good? Bad?

Good/bad in terms of their effects on food crops.
Good: pollinators such as honey bees. Predators which eat "bad"
invertebrates such as ladybirds and hoverflies (eat aphids); ground beetles
(eat slugs). No doubt there are others.

Bad: see above. Aphids, slugs, snails, wireworms, cutworms, weevils. Sadly
the list is endless. Perhaps it would be possible to include those
flatworms which eat earthworms (but I haven't seen anything about them
recently - weren't they supposed to have killed off the UK earthworm
population by now?).


If they disappeared from the earth tomorrow the ecosystem wouldn't
notice - other predators would take up the slack.

Like Man.

? If Man disappeared tomorrow it would probably be a good thing for the
ecosystem. At least for the current ecosystem - it has changed several
times over the hundreds of millions of years since life developed.


But if bees disappeared, that's another thing altogether...

?

Other than plants pollinated by the wind and some other specific pollinators
(humming birds, butterflies, moths, bats), all the bee-pollinated plants
would eventually die off. Most certainly, all our fruit would go, and so
would a lot of the other plants which feed us. I guess that cereals (which
are wind-pollinated) would keep us going for a while.

--
Jeff
(cut "thetape" to reply)