Insight into Habitat Diversity & Threatened Species
Environment Australia, 2001
All Life is Connected. Why?
Our planet is just the right mass. Its gravity holds our breathable atmosphere down, although it is not so strong as to flatten us as it would on Jupiter. Earth is just the right distance from the sun to provide enough light. Sun's heat energy keeps water liquid which dissolves and makes available the materials plants and animals need for life. The sun's heat also drives the water cycle which spreads the water about the world while the tilt of our planet's axis gives us the seasons. Of the hundred or so chemical elements which make up the planet, 20 work together to create plant and animal tissue and to circulate the energy all living things need to be alive.
Plants: nature's miracle workers
It is believed that life has been here and diversifying into the wonderful galaxy of plants and animals for over three billion years. But what is the miracle which switches physical matter and the sun's energy into living matter? In today's world these miracle workers are almost exclusively the plants. Green chlorophyll has the capacity to use sunlight energy to combine carbon dioxide gas and water into sugar. This package of energy is shunted about the cells of the plant and is used to build complex mixtures of atoms into organic matter, the substance of life. So plants are the producers of the ecosystems which are consumed by animals, the herbivores and omnivores, which consume plants and animals, and the carnivores.
Life: a mass of interdependent biodiversity
Energy is lost as heat into the atmosphere and wastes to the ground during all phases of living. But that is not the end. Why isn't there a vast stack of dead things? The critical converters of the dead are the decomposers like bacteria, fungi and many invertebrates. So organic matter returns to the soils as nutrients to grow more plants and animals. Life is a mass of interdependent biodiversity.
If you don't believe this, follow the arrows from the sun in the diagram and think about it.
So who can live alone?