A community about the variety of life on Earth at all levels; including plants, animals, bacteria, and fungi.
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Biodiversity is a term used to describe the enormous variety of life on Earth. It can be used more specifically to refer to all of the species in one region or ecosystem. Biodiversity refers to every living thing, including plants, bacteria, animals, and humans. Scientists have estimated that there are around 8.7 million species of plants and animals in existence. However, only around 1.2 million species have been identified and described so far, most of which are insects. This means that millions of other organisms remain a complete mystery.
Over generations, all of the species that are currently alive today have evolved unique traits that make them distinct from other species. These differences are what scientists use to tell one species from another. Organisms that have evolved to be so different from one another that they can no longer reproduce with each other are considered different species. All organisms that can reproduce with each other fall into one species. Read more...
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The study used social media and photo-sharing websites
I am curious what kind of pictures they used; I could imagine that if you see a hermit crab with plastic you would take a picture of it, which could lead to misleading results. On the other hand, if the crabs were just in the background, this would not be the case.
But It's sad news.
this is uplifting. reduce, REUSE, recycle. at least someone is reusing it. why is ‘wearing’ in quotes?
They're welcome to it, I was done with it
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Hermit crabs all over the world, which scavenge shells as armour for their bodies, are turning increasingly to plastic waste instead.
The study used social media and photo-sharing websites, as one of the researchers Marta Szulkin, an urban ecologist from the University of Warsaw, explained: "We started to notice something completely out of the ordinary.
"Instead of being adorned with a beautiful snail shell, which is what we're used to seeing - they would have a red plastic bottle cap on their back or piece of light bulb."
"According to our calculations, 10 out of the 16 species of land hermit crabs in the world use this type of shelter and it's been observed in all tropical regions of the Earth," Prof Szulkin explained.
What we don't know is how much the element of novelty might affect them - and whether the crabs will fight over artificial plastic shells," explained Prof Szulkin.
Mark Miodownik, who is professor of materials and society at University College London told the BBC that there was a lesson for humans in these images.
The original article contains 602 words, the summary contains 178 words. Saved 70%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!