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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   5339 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for January 22, 2023

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A while back on 4chan, I saw an interesting quote from a book that said something along the lines of:

The larger a system is, the less diversity it can support. Something something, the galapagos islands have vastly more biodiversity than north America despite being much smaller

Now, I didn't save the picture, and it was photograph of a page of a book. I tried searching for "larger" "system" "less diversity" "support", but you know how terrible google is about finding anything that isn't an "approved" mainstream news article nowdays. I ended up finding a paper called Why do several small patches hold more species than few large patches? that was tangentially related, but it seems to be more focused on conservation. Any idea what I could search for to find more information about this as a general topic? I feel like this could "The larger a system is, the less diversity it can support" is a very interesting premise that could describe a lot of topics, especially sociological and economic topics.

the galapagos islands have vastly more biodiversity than north America

Is that actually true? And in which terms "more biodiversity" - more species in general, starting from Archaea and viruses up to primates? More species per square inch? Did somebody really conduct such a research? How did they count the species and what was the result?

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