"The Ripple Effect". A subtle Alteration in a Stable Ecosystem Can Have Unforeseen Serious Consequences
#21 2024 The Rowen Report
Dear Subscriber,
On the heels of my post on bacteria which could be used to scavenge plastic, I have another entertaining post on the environment, and a telling report on ecosystems. This report is clearly applicable to humans, though you’ll have to pause for a moment to connect the dots.
On the African savannah, an ant is reshaping the relationship of lions to prey, and altering the entire landscape. Imagine, lions thwarted by ants?
Well, even an apex predator has to stalk prey, and needs vegetation to hide its stealth pursuit. In the case of lions, they seek the acacia tree to ambush their favored prey, the zebra. But the lions are having a much tougher time of it. The acacia trees are disappearing, and so, the lions have had to turn to another prey – the African buffalo – for their meals, and at much higher risk, as the water buffalo is a formidable prey and can severely injure or kill the lion. But why is this happening after millennia?
Acacia trees were in a symbiotic relationship with a tiny ant. These ants were provided shelter and nectar by the tree. In return, they protected the tree ferociously with their stings. Acacia trees are a favored food of elephants (and other herbivores like giraffes). The ants would crawl into the trunks of feeding elephants and sting the sensitive tissues driving them away.
In recent years has come an invasive large headed ant, likely form an offshore island. Big headed ants are aggressive and have replaced acacia ants where they have invaded. The trees lose their protecting symbionts and get injured or destroyed by the big herbivores. The lions lose their stealth assault advantage over the zebra, and where this shift in the ecosystem has occurred, lions have had to turn to hunt buffalo, which are not as skittish as zebra, but more dangerous to the lions.
Interestingly, scientists expected the lion populations in these areas to shrink. That has not happened, but it is too early to tell what the future will bring. Two lions can bring down a zebra, but it takes 5 to tackle a buffalo and a lion can go down in the process.
The lesson here is that a tiny organism can alter an ecosystem, damage it, and carry forward a “ripple effect”. An ant that was never supposed to be there displaces the native ant protecting an important tree. The tree disappears and what seems to be unrelated organisms, lions and buffalo, are irrevocably altered in the process.
So, how is that relevant to you? Our bodies were designed with their own individual ecosystems. It was to begin with a vaginal birth, breast feeding to establish a gut ecosystem (microbiome), which nurtured, protected and sustained us, as the acacia ant did for its host. In return, we provided food for the good guys, as they protected us. Now, we are living in a world devoted to disrupting the good guys. We are being force fed glyphosate, an antibiotic. Our food animals are being force fed antibiotics, which we consume, disrupting our microbiome. We take antibiotics, further disrupting our microbiome. You lose an important symbiotic bacteria in your gut, and it is replaced by an organism not to friendly, perhaps pathogenic.
Ah, but it’s worse. As the example of the acacia tree and its protecting ant demonstrates, everything in nature is in a harmonic balance, even if we cannot see the forces in the balancing act. So, with modern “medicine”, we have a system where, instead of trying to recover the balance where our bodies are in disharmony, and suffering symptoms, we rely on synthetic petrochemical pharmaceuticals to suppress symptoms. The analogy would be to use pesticides to wipe out the invasive ants, thinking that would resolve the problem. But in reality, the problem wasn’t just the presence of the unprotecting ants, but the absence of the protecting ants. Our bodies enter a disharmony for whatever reason, and we further damage our inner ecology with a system based on chemicals that simply suppress the causative issues. And, we are seeing the end results of this with the steep rise in chronic and degenerative conditions, and immunological diseases.
Please remember the ant story next time you are facing a prescription from a “professional” trained by industry to pimp the products of industry. I admit I am an environmentalist. All life on the planet is in a harmonious balance. We humans are quite professional in disrupting ecosystems, whether macro systems like the Amazon, or microsystems, entirely within ourselves. It is the latter the integrative healer strives to work with to restore health to individual patients But as humans destroy the macrosystem, we are inviting “large headed” ants into our systems to forever alter our inner ecological landscape.
To Your Excellent Health,
Robert Jay Rowen, MD
https://nautil.us/the-tiny-ant-and-the-mighty-lion-512340/#:~:text=In%20areas%20invaded%20by%20big,invaded%20by%20big%2Dheaded%20ants.
I have long wondered whether such practices as oral sex, assuming there's no VD, help maintain the intestinal ecosystem and/or tune up the immune system.