Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Return of wolves to Yellowstone has led to a surge in aspen trees

livescience.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

231–238 of 238 posts

Re: Return of wolves to Yellowstone has led to a surge in aspen trees

#231

Post by Saline9515 »

VWWHFSfQ wrote: post #112
sdenton4 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What causes them to stop reproducing is the destruction of their natural environment on which they feed on. Which is what you want to avoid.

Re: Return of wolves to Yellowstone has led to a surge in aspen trees

#232

Post by isatty »

dboreham wrote: post #211
isatty wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They eat catnip.

Not for its caloric or nutritional value.

Re: Return of wolves to Yellowstone has led to a surge in aspen trees

#233

Post by yieldcrv »

antonvs wrote: post #197
yieldcrv wrote: post #173

> Be Elk > Browsing, grazing, loitering in an ideal environment > Suddenly, mid life, an unidentified powerful beast appears that stalks and kills your kind > Never know why, the source, or that a third species engineered this outcome because they were too lazy to kill you all themselves and just wanted an automated way of doing so

A response worthy of 4chan. Worthy of HN? Not so much. It's not about "automating" the killing of elk. It's about sustainable ecosystems. Human hunting is not the same thing.

I think it fits because it is substantive and has capability of providing introspection

The article and study doesn't address its disposable nature of the elk in favor of "look at the trees"

When there are animals suffering, which to most actual people is a matter to highlight. This entire discussion about wolves in Yellowstone has always contorted itself to spare the reader's thoughts on the gruesome reality of what's actually happening.

Re: Return of wolves to Yellowstone has led to a surge in aspen trees

#234

Post by svieira »

rr808 wrote: post #57

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?

"greater good" is a poor phrasing that doesn't point to the real thing-under-discussion. I prefer the phrase "common good" because it points to the feature that is unique to this good - it can only be held in common. That is, rather than being a "bigger" or a "fuller" good, it is a good that can only be achieved through collective action. No one person can have it of themselves, but together we can all have it. This necessitates collective sacrifice for the sake of this good.

It is also worth noting that not every good that is a "common good" is a necessary good. There are many common goods that can be legitimately given up because there is a hierarchy of goods as well.

Re: Return of wolves to Yellowstone has led to a surge in aspen trees

#235

Post by eszed »

tehjoker wrote: post #138
tialaramex wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Indeed. For the UK in particular you clearly can't have "What it was without people" because that's far too long ago, there aren't records so we'd only be guessing. The New Forest - near me - was built about a thousand years ago, it's not "supposed" to be like that, it was built on purpose and it takes considerable maintenance to keep it that way, felling trees, managing trails, maintaining bridges and so on. Things…

Something I learned recently, acrons (properly prepared, they are indeed poisonous otherwise) used to be a human staple food in the Americas. It was displaced because it is annoying to prepare and the taste is relatively bland.

When I was a kid my family spent a day on a Native American Culture experience at Yosemite National Park. It was really cool! Flint knapping, and brain-tanning, and basket-making, and beadwork, and dancing, all led local tribe-members. Pitched at tourists, of course, but real content, and genuinely interesting.

Anyway, one of the deals was pounding and preparing acorns with a group of the older ladies. We went through the whole process, including cooking the mush with hot stones in a basket. It was... terrible. Bland, with astringent, tannic overtones. I remember my mother (not the most culturally-sensitive of people) asking incredulously if they really eat this. The woman who'd done it with us laughed, and said "No!", but that her grandmother always had, and for the kids (her), she'd always added lots of butter and brown sugar!

Sidenote: that woman was probably seventy, in ~1985, so her grandmother must have seen some shit. I wish I'd been old enough, and educated enough, to have appreciated that at the time.

Re: Return of wolves to Yellowstone has led to a surge in aspen trees

#236

Post by rzwitserloot »

FergusArgyll wrote: post #71
sghiassy wrote: post #67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I think one approach would be; restoring it to a known stable equilibrium. Meaning, if without wolves things continue to deteriorate and clearly hasn't reached a stable equilibrium but you know that with them things were stable over some long term period then you should reintroduce them

That does have the slight disadvantage that a glassed parking lot, utterly uniform and totally devoid of all life, is quite stable.

I agree that it'd be lovely to have a definition that is devoid of subjective (human) judgement, but I don't think "stable" is a useful direction to go for such a definition. It's way too easy to reach stability by ending up at some hellhole ecosystem that is lifeless or exceedingly uniform with nothing interesting. Which, yes, is entirely subjective. That's my point.

Alternative ways to go that seem more suitable to end up at a worthwhile definition that most ought to be happy with:

* Diversity. An ecosystem with more lifeforms is better than less, and complex lifeforms count extra. How much extra is for somebody to write down in detail at some point.

* Utility to humans. An ecological system that constantly causes issues to humans, for example by flooding out a town, spawning plagues that ruin crops, and so on is 'bad'. An ecosystem that humans like spending time in is 'good'.

We are humans and ought to be able to come together and find definitions close enough to what we want without falling into smashing each other's heads in because our definitions of 'nice to walk through' differ slightly. Part of what annoys me about 'modern' political thought is that it presupposes: Everybody hates everybody and we're all infantile morons who are utterly incapable of finding any common ground (and thus only solutions that work despite that state of affairs are worthwhile to think about). This isn't hard to determine. We don't need to eliminate human subjectivity from it.

Re: Return of wolves to Yellowstone has led to a surge in aspen trees

#237

Post by kreyenborgi »

sghiassy wrote: post #67
mkw5053 wrote: post #23

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…

It doesn't have to be exact, but pre-anthropocene is typically a good reference point, considering we are an extinction event.

Re: Return of wolves to Yellowstone has led to a surge in aspen trees

#238

Post by littlestymaar »

dboreham wrote: post #211
isatty wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

They eat catnip.

It's not about food. They take catnip as a psychoactive substance.
Post reply on HN