On this topic, I can never end recommending Adam Curtis's series "All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace", and on this topic of "bounce back" the second episode in that series.

The concept of "natural equilibrium" is a 1950s cybernetic machine fantasy projected onto the natural world rather than an accurate reflection of ecological reality. We can model the world in the language of system theory, but the models we make there might not have much to say about the real world. We can claim that from system theory it follows that there must be an equilibrium (as somewhat of an expert, I can say that even that is not true) and that if we disrupt the system, things will eventually go back to that equilibrium. And if we don't see it, we just needed to wait longer.

The whole stack of logic is not really build on any proper reasoning. The parallel with economics based on the "homo economicus" is striking, also there you reason from an ideal model and try to make inductive statements about the real world, which in many places directly conflict with observation. The "eco-system" and "natural equilibrium" stem from this approach of applying system theory to ecology, and are ideas which are now _very_ ingrained in western thinking, but which are obviously off.

Here is the start of that second episode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FgoereMDUJ0

Senior author here, any questions please ask! As a long-time lurker, it's wonderful to see biodiversity is so popular here!

I think what happened to the cod fishery off North America is really interesting. They overfished the cod then decided to regulate the fishery to let the population come back. But it never recovered - the cod population is stable but at a much lower number. Other 'stuff' (other fish species, jellyfish, etc) had moved into the environmental niche that the cod were in.

I had always assumed this, and my idea of nature bouncing back was more on the millions of years time scale as evolution would result in the refilling of empty ecological niches.

All that said I still think we should just extinct disease carrying mosquitoes.

Here's a study from the southern Appalachian Mountains that found that even in forests that were logged over 100 years ago, species richness and abundance was still lower than in forests that had never been logged:

https://www.researchgate.net/publication/248428489_Centuries...

It'll bounce back, it just doesn't care how we define "back".

Down the line there is a state nature will be in. More/less plants and animals. Who knows. It might not be a pleasant state for people.

The concern seems to be that it will change faster than we can change. What happens if the climate of an agricultural area changes in a lifetime? or a generation? or a decade?

I feel like we should do our best to not destroy the environment, for altruistic reasons but also for the very selfish reason that I have children and relatives with children so I want to leave them with a place they can live in and enjoy not a mess they have to deal with.

I think we have made great strides at saving some near extinct species, the kakapo for example, but we can do better.

Reading the title, I was ready to come in with arguments about the Cambrian explosion and different timescales, the article it's self however is not really talking about things along those lines, it is talking about the short(or very short) term where we assume that once species will easily take up a niche that was occupied by another if one goes extinct. Which I believe is looking at things on the wrong timescale, even if we assume punctuated equilibrium rather than gradual evolution.

> But what this model gives us is a precise, global picture: We can now predict the benefits biodiversity provides anywhere, making it even easier to recognize and take advantage of those benefits."

Shouldn't they simultaneously study the costs of biodiversity? For example, our species left highly biodiverse jungles for less diverse plains, and our bodies are designed to follow and prey on large herbivores that don't do jungle. Less biodiversity creates niches for new diversity. It isn't possible to understand the benefits without the costs.

That was a pointless source. Which 23 categories? How do I know if I care about them?

Fig. 2 [1] lists them. Fig. 3 I think indicates that 20 of them have positive effect size on biodiversity, which I think was the point. "Learning and inspiration" is an interesting category. Carbon sequestration ranks high, with Terrestrial (as opposed to the larger Oceanic) having quite a few studies behind it.

1. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-026-03200-4

This doesn't seem like serious science. They just looked at correlation between biodiversity and a few dozen things.

Of course, for many reasons, we should try not to drive species to extinction. That's not really science; it's just basic moral intuition. People seem embarrassed to admit that their motivations are perfectly reasonable things like "I like living things and we shouldn't kill them off".

For anyone curious about what can be done about this, see the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) adopted during COP15 by 188 countries - https://www.cbd.int/gbf

Push your leaders to stay the course

I'm reminded of Ian Malcom's monologue in Jurassic Park (the book).

Paraphrased: "Nature will be fine, it's humanity we should be worried about."

Bounce back can take millions of years.

The "natural" state of the universe is having no life at all. And once our sun implodes this region of the universe will cease to be an exception.

Instead of trying to perform a balancing act with nature we should just continue to shape things into things that are more convenient to us. Like redirecting water into a desert.

Maybe someone here can help me come up with a plan where I do my (futile?) part to mitigate this, if only temporarily.

Nearby me is a cloud forest in central America. The last time we had a strong El Nino, substantial amounts of endemic amphibians that live up in those forests lost the mist-melt puddles they depended on. If the drought we're experiencing continues as long as expected from this cycle, we're going to lose a lot of beautiful frogs forever.

Can I do anything about this? Find my favorite frog community on my favorite mountain and regularly lug a backpack of water up there? Run up a sprinkler system? Will it make a difference?

This is what gives me pause about “killing all the mosquitoes”.

Without man/humankind nature would bounce back very well but it would take time.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't make every effort to re-wild places. It'll slow or even prevent the loss of at-risk species and introduce resilience to ecosystems against the onslaught of climate change.

Isn't an ecosystem an arbitrary area somewhere on the planet? Weather is a massive effect on these so called ecosystems and it is global. You might say there is only one single global ecosystem

The system may return, but less diversity means less resiliency. The 'return' isn't a return to baseline. That system return is an attempt to attain a state of function that is no longer available. That leaves this returned system in a constant state of stress. Stress on any system reduces function, increases failure rates, and extends repair times greatly. When a stressed system attempts to heal, many factors inhibit or outright prevent healing from occuring.

That's all observation, reasoning, and logic. Merely observing what occurs in a system that loses or gains is enough data to make fairly striking conclusions. The systems never return to baseline. Not once. Not ever. We've never observed a return to baseline after a species is destroyed, nor if an invasive species enters the system.

Once balance is lost, it cannot be attained again. Will not be. Has not been. Observed data is clear about this pattern. There is no equilibrium. There is a system that is functioning and then there is a system that no longer functions. There are no return to function systems in nature. Humans have not observed a mechanism that would bring that about, nor observed the occurrence of such.

One failure leads to another, and to another. Cascading. That's what we observe over generations of data collection.

I mean, it 'bounced back' after a literal ASTEROID..

We are in the 6th mass extinction event. Want to feel bad? Look at the numbers of decline in the last 40 years, it's dramatic. Even in my lifetime it's been dramatic.

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Did stream restoration for a few years and the thing that stuck with me is you can put the habitat back and the species still don't return. Some of them just have nowhere left to come from.