The Exchange of Plant and Animal Species Between the New World and Old World
Overview
When Europeans reached North America's shorelines in the late 1400s and began to explore the continent's interior in the 1500s, they saw the vast land as a source of new plants, animals, and minerals for them to use and to transport back to Europe. As they colonized this New World, they also brought with them many familiar plants and animals for food, farming, and other purposes. This exchange of species between the two continents had positive and negative effects, and they continue today. On the positive side, the exchange introduced what would become important agricultural crops and beneficial animals to both continents. It also, however, expanded the range of species that carried disease and competed with beneficial native species, and it also permanently changed the face of each continent.
Background
When the Europeans landed in the New World in the late 1400s and early 1500s, North America was an untamed wilderness filled with mysterious flowers, trees, birds, and mammals. Christopher Columbus wrote of the scent of a breeze from the shores of North America as "the sweetest thing in the world." Other explorers similarly reported of the biological wealth of this unknown continent: flocks of birds so thick they blocked out the noonday sun; fishes so large and numerous that they sometimes hampered river navigation; enormous stands of pines, oaks and chestnuts; and meadows so vast that their boundaries were beyond sight.
This page contains 201 words.
The Exchange of Plant and Animal Species Between the New World and Old World article
Read the rest of this article.
This article contains 1,568 words
(approx. 5 pages at 300 words per page).
Order our Introduced species Article
