SciDevNet: Rare animal species are vital to maintaining tropical ecosystems and could cause a chain reaction of disastrous biodiversity loss if they go extinct, a paper warns today.
Animals that are considered rare -- because they occupy a niche environment or there are few of them -- are more likely than common animals to perform specialised and often irreplaceable roles in their environments, the study found.
This is especially true for highly biodiverse environments, such as the tropics, the researchers...