Vertebrate ecologist Ray Pierotti reminds us that desert nature includes human collaboration: “As I learned as a child playing in the desert, humans are the ultimate niche constructors. Well before the invasion by Europeans, indigenous peoples in the American deserts were altering landscapes and moving around plants and animals, such as introducing chuckwallas as emergency food sources top the islands of the Sea of Cortes.”
“These cultural dispersals allowed the introduced species to occupy new niches that altered plant and arthropod communities of the desert islands.”
All such phenomena fit with THE MEANDERING STREAM of evolutionary processes. We as land dwellers are part of the flow of that desert stream.
