Googling for Endangered Species

Google sometimes falters in its pledge to "do no evil," particularly its waffling with regard to Chinese censorship, but researchers have discovered that the Mountain View search behemoth's algorithm for ranking Web pages is perfect for determining the critical links in a given food chain.

It may be a stretch to say Google is now in the business of saving endangered species from extinction but its technology may just aid in that noble endeavor, according to a BBC News article. The findings were published in a paper by PLoS Computational Biology that determines "who eats whom" in a given ecosystem, essential in determining how kinks in a food chain result in the extinction of animals.

For example, bald eagles became endangered from the once-widespread use of the chemical pesticide DDT. The DDT would accumulate in rivers and streams, where it eventually made its way up the food chain until the eagles would eat the larger fish contaminated (but not affected) by the substance, which would make eagle eggs brittle, seriously lowering their pre-hatch survival rate. Had the Google-like technology been around at the time, perhaps DDT never would have been used to begin with (although it's really all about the Benjamins and political will).

The scientific version of Google's PageRank algorithm would help researchers more quickly understand which extinctions would lead to an ecosystem's collapse, according to the academic paper's abstract:

"We use the algorithm to bridge the gap between qualitative (who eats whom) and quantitative (at what rate) descriptions of food webs. We show that our simple algorithm finds the best possible solution for the problem of assigning importance from the perspective of secondary extinctions in all analyzed networks."

Stefano Allesina of the University of Chicago's department of ecology and evolution and Mercedes Pascual of University of Michigan, the paper's co-authors, say the tweaked PageRank algorithm gave them the exact same results as more complicated algorithms requiring more computational muscle.

Not sure if Google is officially behind this, but you can't buy better marketing.

Photo courtesy of S. Taheri, via Wikimedia Commons