Lucy Blog

     How human-like are chimps?  Sure our DNA is only two percent different, but that still puts us worlds apart.  Right?  Wrong!  Chimps are more human-like than you think.  This is proven by Lucy, the daughter of a circus chimp who was raised human.
     A couple bought Lucy when she was two days old and raised her as their own.  Eventually she learned to stand and walk like human children, and then even began to pick out her own clothes.  She learned to make tea and many other chores.  But this didn't mean anything, did it?  Many animals can be trained to do things and surely a chimp is no different?  To be sure the couple found a man to teach Lucy sign language.  The chimp learned fifty different signs and then was able to use them to carry on conversations.  At one point, she found an old, rotten radish and decided to eat it.  After one bit, she spit it out.  When she was asked what it was, she signed all on her own, "cry, hurt food."  On another occasion she even lied.  She had had an accident on the floor, and when she was asked who had done it, she signed, "Sussy," the name of a grad student who came to the house sometimes.  She had mentally become completely human.  However this became a problem, when she grew too strong and destructive to keep and the couple decided to release her into a nature reserve in Africa.  She was too human to be a chimp and her health quickly began to deteriorate, allow with the heaths of other humanized chimps at the reserve.  In an attempt to make these chimps be chimps, they were moved to an island in a river, Sussy the grad student then moved into a cage on the island to keep an eye on them.  Eventually the apes left due to hunger, all accept Lucy.  For the next three years, she stayed with the cage, only surviving, because Sussy fed her.  But eventually she did learn to be a chip and went to join the others, but she kept her deep rooted trust in humans, and this would lead to her demise.  Two years later, her skeleton was found, without any fur and with hands and feet missing.  She was thought to have just wandered up to a poacher who then shot and killed her.  Thus was the end to Lucy's confused life.

Questions

1.  She showed us exactly how human and smart chimpanzees are.

2.  She taught us that you don't need to be a human to be human.  The lines between people and animals are not so thickly drawn.

3.  It makes me see just how humanlike and smart chimps are.  A 2% difference in DNA is not that much.

4.  The experiment, while beneficial, was not worth the cost.  Knowledge is not worth the life of an animal, especially one as human like as Lucy.  The experiment caused her demise, and so it was not worth it.

5.  Lucy's end was an indirect result of the experiment and it saddened me how such a human-like creature could die as collateral damage.  It angered me that someone would kill Lucy as she had apparently trusted her killer entirely.  To betray such trust by killing that animal is sick. It angers me extremely.

Thinking Like a Mountain Response

      Mountains understand things in ways people can't, at least according to Aldo Leopold.  He was a hunter who, like most, viewed wolves as villains that kill livestock and wild deer.  He believed that "... fewer wolves meant more deer and that no wolves would mean hunter's paradise."  That opinion changed the day he actually killed a wolf, and he realized how necessary wolves are to a healthy environment.
    In this story the narrator relates a story from when he was "... young and full of trigger itch."  Since, he believed that fewer wolves meant more deer, so he, like many others, never passed up a chance to kill a wolf.  According to the story, a friend  and he fire repetitively into a pack of wolves.  They kill a she-wolf and injure one of her pups while the rest flee. They are able to get close to the she-wolf in time to see "... a fierce green fire dying in her eyes."  Then the narrator realized that, unlike people, the the wolves and mountain did not believe all wolves should die.  As the years passed, he saw many states kill off their wolves, and as the wolves were removed he saw deer multiply and destroy the environment; "I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddle-horn." He realized unlike many others that wolves were needed to keep the environment stable and saw that diversity equals stability.
    I agree with the author's view although my way of thinking did not change.  Wolves may kill deer, but while this seems bad in the moment, it is actually good in the larger scale of things.  The wolves are able to keep deer populations down thus making what deer survive stronger and lets the environment remain strong enough to support the deer and other animals.  Wolves are as necessary to this environment as the base producers and the sun itself. Where there are no wolves, the deer overrun the ecosystem and eat themselves and others out of house and home.  Each animal has its place in the environment.

How does one protect the world from flooding and disease, and even restore damaged habitats?
 To protect the world from these issues, one must simply protect the plants.  Plants naturally help with the above issues along with keeping the soil healthy as well.  Plants are a very big part of life on Earth. The food, the books we read, and many other items all depend on plants.  However, plants and their biodiversity are under threat from climate change, people, and invasive species and need some human protection.

To save the plants, people need to save the seeds, and that is what the Millenium Seed Bank is for.  Twenty-four thousand species are already safely stored within this organization.  These seeds are believed to be able to stay that way for thousands of years, protecting a biodiverse Earth for generations to come.  However, the job is far from done as these three-billion seeds only account for 10% of all the plant species on the Earth.  More seeds need to be gathered to project the world from floods and disease from now and into the distant future.

1st Post

Welcome to my Biology Blog. I am a student at Animas High School in Durango, CO.  Check back soon to see videos, articles, and my thoughts on what I work with in my sophomore biology class.