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Notes -
Edit: reading your other response you were looking for catastrophic impacts on humans, which isn’t the main point of what I wrote, but I’ll keep it up because I think it’s an interesting subject.
The chytrid fungus pandemic has taken a staggering toll on amphibian life around the planet. Probably the most impactful invasive species in the world from the standpoint of affected species and proportion of global biodiversity.
White nose syndrome is another fungal epidemic that has decimated bat populations across North America.
Fun finding, there’s a study connecting the collapse of bat populations to increased infant mortality. Bats consume copious amounts of insects. When they disappear, farmers have been found to increase their use of pesticides in affected counties. These pesticides have medical implications for humans.
https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.adg0344
Another example with a more direct human impact, the disappearance and near extinction of the American Chestnut. Once was among the most prized and useful tree in North America for both its wood and its nuts. It was among the most common tree across eastern forests. In the early 1900s, chestnut blight arrived from Asia and essentially erased the species from the North American landscape within a decade.
Other invasives like cheatgrass generate much higher fire risks in the west, and aquatic invasives such as zebra mussels are extremely expensive for management organizations to deal with. The latter can reorganize entire food webs when introduced and end up having impacts on local economies such as fisheries.
Makes sense. But, yeah, I guess the core of my hypothesis is that human ingenuity and the human drive for survival is what keeps industries afloat in the face of ecological adversity, due to humans' vested interests. So it needs to be an example where humans have a large vested interest.
And that's not to say that there aren't problems which develop which make the agriculture harder or more expensive. It's just that I suspect people keep coming up with ways to overcome these problems, which results in much less impact to everyday people. Perhaps I'll edit that onto my post when I get a moment.
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