World Wildlife Day: Why We Need Animals

Without plants and animals, our lives would not be possible. Oxygen, clean water and soil, and our earliest tools, food, and clothing came from flora and fauna. Even our fossil fuels are the result of Paleozoic Era ecosystems that captured the sun's energy-the same energy that we are now using billions of years later. Yet increasingly, we fail to acknowledge the tens of thousands of creatures with whom we cohabitate, the wildlife upon whom our very existence is contingent.

Throughout our development, our oceans and rivers have provided us with fish; grasslands and forests have provided us with bushmeat; plants that we cultivated became staple fruits and vegetables; ecosystems ensured reliable weather and clean water. We domesticated some wild animals to become our livestock, providing milk, meat, and clothing. Wild canines developed over the years to become dogs, our hunting partners and bodyguards, our most effective alarm system in the night. Throughout those early ages, just like today, our world's fruiting trees and forests were pollinated by bats and birds, squirrels and bees. And from these forests we built houses for shelter, fires to keep us warm, ships that would take us across oceans, books that carried our hard-earned knowledge. 

As science progresses we continue to draw inspiration from our wild relatives -- a bird's wing, a spider's web, the complex architecture of ants. Through biomimicry, the innovations of wildlife have allowed us to develop technology that improves our lives, and to create medicines that save millions of people annually. We derive blood pressure medication from viper venom and borrow insulin from the pancreases of pigs. Each year we borrow 500,000 horseshoe crabs from the wild to harvest their blood (they are later released back into the wild); the baby-blue blood can detect and immobilize bacterial contamination even at concentrations as low as one part per trillion. (If you've ever had an injection in the U.S., you were protected because of the blood of these prehistoric-looking sea creatures).

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