Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but it's fair to assume that vulture looks are an acquired taste. The hook-beaked, scrawny-necked and chunky-bodied birds were immediately described as "disgusting" by English biologist Charles Darwin, although his revulsion was also due to the vultures' diet of dead animals. Yet that same stomach-churning tendency also causes vultures to be indispensable to human ecosystems, since the rotting carcasses contain dangerous diseases that could spread to humans if not ingested by more iron-stomached scavengers.
In fact, a recent study in the journal American Economic Review revealed that the unintentional decimation of India's vulture population has had tragic consequences for nearby humans. Scientists estimate that their near-disappearance on the subcontinent nearly two decades ago — an unintentional byproduct of human activity — has led to more than half a million excess deaths.
