Russ Van Horn is currently in Peru to study Andean (spectacled) bears. Read his previous post, Andean Bears and Cameras.

An e-mail was posted recently on the Andean bear e-mail network that got me thinking about the question “Why do we care about Andean bears?” I realized that I was not only thinking about this question, but also pondering “Why do we care about the conservation of nature?” I’m not sure I can clearly answer these questions, and I’m sure I won’t say anything that hasn’t been said before by someone else, but here goes. In this post I’ll focus on the reasons for (bear) conservation presented from a scientific viewpoint, but there are other reasons for caring about conservation. I’ll write about those in my next post.

There are a few different terms that conservation biologists use when they’re trying to describe why to focus on one species instead of another. The term “flagship species” refers to a charismatic species that represents its ecosystem. Because it’s charismatic, the species draws attention to the conservation needs of the whole ecosystem. A flagship species acts as an ambassador for its ecosystem, in the same way that individual animals in zoos act as ambassadors for their species.

Flagship species are usually big, or colorful, or cute (think giant panda as the flagship species for China’s bamboo forests). Many of them have big teeth and claws. We humans often pay more attention to large animals that we think could eat us than we do to small plants we can’t eat. A flagship species, like the Andean bear, motivates people to care more about the cloud forest than a bromeliad could. (Although Andean bears have biggish teeth and claws, they don’t eat people. And although you could eat a bromeliad, I don’t recommend it. Some bromeliads have nasty spines, and all of them are chewy.) I’ll talk more about how bears motivate people in my next post.

A second term that conservationists use to describe why we care about Andean bears is “umbrella species.” An umbrella species is a species that has certain ecological needs that mean that in order to conserve that species, you take actions that end up conserving the whole ecosystem. So, we do what we can to conserve species that we think act as good indicators of the health of the ecosystem, and hope that this results in conservation of the whole system. Andean bears seem to require a lot of forested habitat that contains a wide variety of plants, so they’re thought to be good umbrella species for South American forests.

A third term that sometimes gets applied to species in the conservation spotlight is “keystone species.” This means that a species is critically important to the conservation of an ecosystem – a species that we think has big effects on a lot of other species. If that species is lost, then there will be major consequences for the remaining species. Some people think Andean bears are keystone species because of their role in seed dispersal. Because Andean bears eat a lot of fruits, and because we think they move long distances, they move the seeds of plants around from one place to another. This allows the seeds that germinate from the bear dung to grow in new locations, far from their parent plants. If there were no Andean bears in the forest, the distribution of the plants they eat might change dramatically.

When I think about these three terms, to me they illustrate that we’re trying to keep ecosystems working. In spite of all the research that has been done and that we ever will be able to do, we’ll never be able to fully understand how ecosystems work. We don’t have enough time, or enough people, or enough money. And we may not be smart enough, either. The pioneering conservationist, Aldo Leopold, compared conservation to a mechanic who was working on a machine that he didn’t quite understand, and said “To keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution of intelligent tinkering.” In other words, if you want the thing to keep working, but you don’t fully understand how it works, make sure you don’t lose any parts.

I’m a lousy mechanic. I hope I’m a better conservation scientist.

Russ Van Horn is a senior researcher with the San Diego Zoo’s Institute for Conservation Research.

Posted in Bear Awareness, Conservation, Default, Field Studies, General | Link to this post

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