Heroes Not Zombies

Nature loves diversity. Healthy ecosystems are filled with a wide range of species. Intensive farming has shown us how single species crops are difficult to maintain in good health which is why they need support from both fertilisers and “-cides” (insecticides, fungicides….). When a particular species becomes a pest we’ve made several attempts to counter them by either directly attempting to cut back their numbers or by introducing some new predator to try and control them. Both experiments can go horribly wrong.

Peter Johnson, at the University of Colorado, has been experimenting with a radically different approach – increasing diversity. He has shown that an effective way to reduce the prevalence of certain parasitical diseases is to increase the biodiversity of the ecosystems in which their hosts live. You can read more about this research here.

This is brilliant work and it shows how serious, common, infective diseases in the world, such as schistosomiasis and Lyme Disease, could be tackled by increasing biodiversity. The logic, of course, is that such diseases are likely to become steadily more problematic as our world loses species.

We really do live in a connected world and there really are better answers to our health problems than just throwing more chemicals around.