What do you do when a endangered animal eats endangered plants?

Best Answer

Thats actually a problem that I had faced in an Environmental Science class. As it turns out, if both species are protected by an organization, like the DEC, in an effort to increase the populations of both they try to produce more plants, while maintaining their efforts with the animal. A very clear example, even though not a plant is coral. Coral harbor many fish which maybe considered endangered, they feed and live in these areas, and so they try to focus on maintaing the coral rather than the fish because the coral does not require the fish to survive, but the fish require the coral.

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Other Answers (9)

• The plant is probably part of it%26#039;s natural diet. Animals and plants would not be endangered except for the abject stupidity of the human race. Lets cut down more trees, build more shopping centers (which have lots of unrented spaces), build more McMansions, pave over more open areas, pollute more rivers and streams, etc., etc., etc..... We are also on the endangered list, but most don%26#039;t want to acknowldge that fact. Personal Knowledge/Experience
• I%26#039;d go with Shesascreamer%26#039;s answer. If the endangered animal is eating an endangered plant that is naturally part of its habitat, then you%26#039;d have to let it happen. Introducing other plants to offer alternative food might just finish killing off the endangered plant and the endangered plant might even depend on that animal to survive (pollination, destruction of competing species, eating other predators, and so on.)
  
  Isn%26#039;t there a problem now with Koalas and insufficient Eucalyptus trees, to name one of many co-dependent species?
• It sounds like they are going out together, out to extinction that is, and if they are both indigenious to the area, then it makes sense that the food suply of one facing extinction, may be becoming extinct for some interwoven relationship they have that we may not studied yet.
  
  I Dunno . .. ..
• Try to help the plant. If it becomes more common, the endangered animal becomes more common too; if it goes extinct, you%26#039;ll lose both.
• nothing, I%26#039;m fairly sure Mother Nature knows what shes doing.
  
  besides haven%26#039;t we, as humans interfered with nature enough already? common sense
• That%26#039;s quite the predicament...write your Congressman?
• Farewell the plant?
• stuffs me, good question
• cry