211–220 of 238 posts
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You're responding to someone who believe that omnivorous animals don't exist[1], so you can assume that they will disregard whatever biologists say and trust their feelings rather than reality. [1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44674445
Insane how they spout out nonsense as fact. Cats are obligate carnivores. They eat protein. End of story. Please do not feed your cat vegetables.
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Instead of thinking of this as a benefit of wolves (specifically), you can view it as an advantage of having something in their ecological niche. In this case, the niche is 'apex predator.' It's a niche which is repeated across pretty much every ecosystem. They keep populations of their prey species down, preventing overpopulation and the many indirect problems that come with it. Perhaps without an apex predator the…
> species that evolve with a predator tend to reproduce more quickly As an example of this, a healthy female rabbit will produce anywhere from 20 to 50 additional rabbits in a single year. There have been many documented explosions of rabbit populations due to lack of natural predators which have caused significant ecological crisis. They've evolved to reproduce so quickly because they are the "food" in the food chai…
However, species don’t evolve as a unit. Which genomes are most likely to survive a die-off?
All else being equal?
The ones with the most copies. So not the ones that are holding back on reproductions.
I talked to a local who was friends with ranchers who now lose stock to wolves. They hate it. Its an interesting use case of local control, is the greater good more important than the people who live there?
> I talked to a local who was friends with ranchers who now lose stock to wolves. They hate it. Well if they liked it, their anscestors wouldn't have killed the wolves in the first place.
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If you’re going to exterminate every species that kills humans, there’s gonna be a lot of very angry dog owners on your doorstep.
That’s not my argument. I’m saying wolves are dangerous, and as a human, I don’t want to have to worry about wolves when I’m hiking Yellowstone. Call me selfish but I’d rather be alive than feel good that the forest is back to its natural state.
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I often hear this argument, "oh, but how far can we possibly go??! But deer are pretty?!", especially from farmers and grouse shooting estates here in the UK. It's wild, because it's so easy to measure and asses: an ecological desert, dying ecosystem, rich in single overgrazing specie is unequivocally bad. Rich, lush ecosystems sustaining great biodiversity and ecologically unique features (eg chalk streams or temper…
> But deer are pretty?! Deer are simply tall, disease-carrying vermin--basically rats with long legs. They eat everything. They multiply like bloody rabbits. They host a ton of diseases--especially when overpopulated (effectively everywhere that doesn't have lots of wolves or big cats). I really don't understand why we don't hunt them aggressively when there is no apex carnivore to keep them under control.
And hunters aren't sadly dumb enough to wipe the species out. They whittle down their numbers, and then leave them alone to repopulate.
Leading to my shock when I wrote off my car by hitting a deer, instead of a kangaroo as god intended.
This is great news! Why doesn't fish and game just increase the number of elk tags they sell? There are multiple ways to reduce the elk population.
It's amazing the impact that the reintroduction has had. On a recent winter trip there I also learned that the reintroduction literally moved rivers [1]: - Elk quit loitering along streams, so willow and cottonwood shot up, anchoring soil and narrowing channels. - The new woody growth gave beavers lumber; their colonies jumped from one in 1996 to a dozen within fifteen years, raising water tables and rebuilding wetla…
I’ve always found the idea of “restoring” ecosystems a bit philosophically tricky. When we say that reintroducing wolves led to ecological improvements, what’s our reference point? Are we comparing it to Yellowstone 100 years ago? 500? Pre-human settlement? Ecological baselines are inherently arbitrary—there’s no objectively “correct” state of nature to return to. The systems we call degraded are often just different…
Basically his take on the whole hobby is that we should stop measuring, changing water and generally stressing about keeping the system as is.
Instead you create a good substrate, add lots of plants and just watch how life will evolve. Fish and plants might die, but that's ok because it's part of the natural process.
They only moved few dozen wolves, over 1000km from their homes, which is not going to have any significant consequences. Even today there's only about 100 wolves in the park? 2,200,000 acres, with 100 wolves. Then they've made the claim that those 100 wolves in 2.2million acres has resulted in plants and fish returning? As opposed to their efforts doing nothing at all?
> 100 wolves in 2.2million acres Without engaging with the rest of your comment, and even assuming that wolves are distributed evenly (of course they are not, and some parts of the park are not suitable for wolves): This equates to 1 wolf per chunk of land measuring about 6 miles square, so about 15% smaller than the city of San Francisco (which is a small city). Wolves are territorial and they move through forest qu…
Territory sizes range from 25 to 150 square miles
That is 15,000 to 100,000 acres per half-dozen wolves in the GP's units.