The+importance+of+biodiversity-the+lack+of+pollinators

** Natalia Campo ** ** p.6 **

** The lack of pollinators **

**“At least one-third of the world’s agricultural crops depend upon pollination provided by insects and other animals”**
===**Pollination is an important process that doesn’t just benefit humans but maintains a balance in the production of flowers in the world’s biodiversity. Large part of the flowering plant is product of the pollination, which happens through the help of pollinators such as bees and birds. This process also provides human a large percent of the food sources that we consume in our daily activities. Finally it represents the relationship between plants and animals within the environment. This ecological service can be manipulated by the human’s activities that take away the habitat and the environment where plants and animals live and interact. By removing their environment the number of bees are decreasing, which causes that the number of plants decreased too.** === ===**This decreasing in the environment affects the humans in a direct way. As time passed our population is caring more about saving our “environment” but we don’t understand that it’s not just the land or the oceans, is every organism that makes part of our daily life and that represents a very important process within the rest of the ecological services. One of this organisms are the bees, they are dying mainly because of the uses of toxic substances from large agricultural companies and common farmers that apply it to the crops and ends up affecting the development of the pollinators. If this keeps happening and there comes a time when our main pollinators such as bees decreased in a large percent, humans would not be able to consume half or more of the food that we eat now. This would also affect the production of food made by plants in the fact that if there is no pollinators who can take pollen from flower to flower, by some time the production would come to an end.** ===

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**Hypothesis** **If the world runs out of pollinators then the mayority of food that humans consume would dessappear because there would be no animal that can fertilize the food produced by plants.**  ** Experimental Design ** ** Materials: **  1. Black-eyed Susan seeds  2. Pot  3. Sand <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> 4. Insect protecting net <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> 5. Water <span class="bhead" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;"> <span class="bhead" style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif;">** Procedure: ** <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman',Times,serif; font-size: 10.5pt;">Set the sand in the pot until it fill ¾ of the pot, and locate the seeds on top (about 5 seeds). After that move the pot to a place where the sun can heat it and have always natural air, make sure that it has always well-drained soil. Put the insect protecting net around the pot about 30 cm away from the plant. This is to avoid the presence of honey bees which is the independent variable of the experiment and the dependent variable would be the product of the food reproduction. By this action you’ll control the experimental groups of the pollinators over the plant, taking away the fact of supplying the amount of pollination required to maintain the amount of products consumed. Each day make sure to spray water on it once a day for the following 6 to 8 weeks until it totally grow. If by any chance you can’t spray it, it’s drought tolerant. After 6-8 weeks you’ll get the direct consequences of the production of plants without pollinators.