If you whirl through Rheinaue in Bonn, a garden landscape created during the Federal Horticultural Show in 1979, you’ll sometimes have to swerve your head: flocks of bright green throat-throated macaws, originally from Pakistan, come for a ride. Kamikaze and wrap around you. In the same park you can find cute beaver mice, originally from South America, which are now widespread there – as in many places in Europe and North America.
Animals looking for a new home
These are just two examples of a long list of alien species that have established themselves as neobiota in Germany since the discovery of America in 1492: the Federal Agency for the Protection of Nature (BfN) now includes 46 vertebrates, 273 invertebrates, 470 plants, and 96 fungi. – Added more than 2000 species that live here without interruption
In The Nature of the Future, biologist Bernhard Kegel describes the change in the animal and plant world from a global perspective and focuses primarily on explaining it against the background of global warming. In twelve chapters, he shows the important change taking place and its consequences: animals and plants leave their traditional habitat, entire ecosystems and food webs are distant, pushing species to the edge of their payload limits – on land and on water.
The author describes the factors that favor the spread of new species, the lessons that can be drawn from past climate changes, where there is already a devastating change in ecosystems and what other consequences this could have.
While ringed parrots cause relatively few difficulties, a lot of writers read like dystopia, unfortunately the phenomena are frighteningly real: readers have to bear that in 2014 in Queensland, Australia, 45,000 fruit bats died from heat in a day One very hot. Elsewhere, swarms of jellyfish clog filter systems at desalination plants. As parasites find increasingly good living conditions, the escape routes for plants and animals in our sprawling landscapes are closed to other climatic zones.
All this sometimes reminds us of the scenarios that many people remember from “The Swarm” by Frank Schatzing. BUT: Bernard Kegel’s descriptions are not alarming or sensational, but are backed up by many powerful sources with which he presents the case for research in an interesting and informed manner.
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