The United Nations declared 2010 as International Year of Biodiversity to celebrate life on earth and the value of biodiversity for our lives.
Biodiversity is the variety of life on earth — the plants, animals and micro-organisms, which are essential to sustain healthy ecosystems.
Biodiversity is important to humans as these networks provide us with vital services, which we depend on such as food, water, and air to breathe!
Western Australia is recognised as having eight of Australia's 15 national biodiversity hotspots. Located across the State from the North Kimberley to the Fitzgerald River, Ravensthorpe in the south of the State, biodiversity hotspots are areas that are considered to be largely intact, supporting native species and high diversity of locally endemic species, which are found no where else in the world.
Humans are part of our rich biodiversity and we have the ability to help protect or destroy it.
In the rivers of south-west Western Australia our freshwater habitats are biologically outstanding because 80 per cent of the native fish and 100 per cent of the native crustaceans (gilgies, marron and koonacs) are endemic. They are under threat as many native species have been driven to the edge of extinction and now exist as small remnant populations in reserves and undeveloped areas.
Draining of waterways, agricultural run-off, rising salinity, development, changing weather patterns and the discharge of polluted stormwater run-off from roads into lakes, have combined to destroy the habitats where these fish lived; in losing them we are now paying the price with unbalanced ecosystems, and plagues of mosquitoes and the diseases they carry.
At the Native Fish Breeding Laboratory in Shenton Park, the Department of Fisheries and the University of Western Australia are conducting research projects designed to find populations of these fish, capture enough for breeding and conservation genetics programs, and hopefully restock our waterways with the support of the community.
This is just one way that humans are helping to protect our biodiversity for the future!
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