Many hate tigers, which view us as meat, and elephants, which view human crops as their own.
It turns out that wild bees are the main pollinators for human crops, too, so this affects everyone.
Bat extinctions aren't just an academic issue -- 1 million bats can eat nearly 700 tons of insects per year, including mosquitoes that carry human diseases and agricultural pests that damage human crops.
The features that make an organism particularly valuable as a model include ease of growth, availability of experimental tools (e.g., genetic manipulation), evolutionary relationship to other organisms of interest (e.g., human, crops, pathogens, etc)., and presence of interesting phenotypes.
As they became more dependent on human crops for food, the monkeys came closer to human habitations.
Honey bees are both a model system in behavioural genomics, and the dominant managed pollinator of human crops; consequently understanding the mating process has both pure and applied value.
Although M. violaceum is related to major crop pathogens like U. maydis and Puccinia spp., it has no impact on human activities, making it valuable for the study of natural host-pathogen coevolution, and avoiding the risk of dispersion in human crops.
While this represents a minor concern for species of low nucleotide diversity such as humans, crop plants and domestic animals, it is a key issue for highly heterozygous genomes with nucleotide diversity in excess of 1%.
The eerie possibility of robots manipulating humans crops up in science fiction tales like Ex Machina or Battlestar Galactica.
For example, viruses have had devastating economic consequences on honey-bee and shrimp populations [1], [2], and many viral pathogens in humans, crops and livestock are vectored by insects.
