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By BRIDGE8 under license from Mangorolla CIC 2024
One of the things i do in my job is to design surveys to measure how many animals are in an area. It’s important to know this if you are going to build something in that area, especially if the animal (or plant) is rare.
We need to figure out whether building stuff in a spot will effect or hurt any animals, and how many. That way we can know whether it’s ok to build there, and what you have to do to protect the animals that were there to start with. We need to make sure that the overall population will still be ok, even if we have to move or accidentally hurt the ones that live there.
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Yes the number of idividuals of a species in an area is very important. We call this Abundence. Some species can be very rare, and other very dominatant.
If there is a change in these numbers it can tell us that something might have changed in the environment. So for example: There is a species of worm called Capitella capitata. In a normal environment this speices has abuncance of about 50 – 200 individuals per a square meter of sediment. But if there is extra nutrients in the water, say a sewage treatement plant accidentaly releases untreated water, then the numbers of these worms can increase to 3000 individuals per a square meter of sediment.
The other example is rare species, so there might only be 1-5 individuals per a square meter of sediment. Some times if there is a big disterbance like a harbour is dredge so the boats can det through. Then the rare species become the domanant species. For example there is a species Litocorsa sp.1, it is quite rare but sometimes in dredge spoil (where they dump the sediment from the dredge) this species can increase to very high numbers.
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Yes, knowing the abundance of the animals in a given area is VERY IMPORTANT. I think Shona and Elizabeth explain it quite well though so I wont repeat what they have said. But in my line of work like Shona explains I need to know what the ‘normal’ abundance is of the animals I’m interested in because if there is a large change from what is ‘normal’ then I know something is wrong.
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The scientists have answered this question really well. Abundance is really important in ecology. It’s better to understand what is happening in the whole ecosystem, rather than what is happening to just one species. Some scientists do just focus on one particular species though.
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