Comment by incomingpain
7 months ago
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?
I'm not a biologist, but I grew up in West Yellowstone around the time wolves were reintroduced. Their return—and its impact—has been extensively studied by experts far more qualified than me.
That said, I believe wolves had a profound effect on the Yellowstone ecosystem, particularly on elk and deer populations. Before their reintroduction, those species had few natural predators beyond hunters, vehicles, bears, and the occasional mountain lion. The imbalance led to overgrazing and the spread of diseases like Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in elk.
> 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?
They've studied it and came to these conclusions, yes. Have you studied it and come to different conclusions?
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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> 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 quite well. A ~35 square mile territory wouldn't be out of the question.
Edit: Notes from elsewhere:
> Wolf packs in Minnesota, for example, can have territories that range from 7.5 mi2 to >214 mi2 — a 28 fold difference in territory size
> Average territory size in northwestern Montana was 220 square kilometers (185 square miles) but was highly variable (USFWS et al. 2002). Average territory size for Yellowstone Gray Wolves was larger, averaging 891 square kilometers (344 square miles) (USFWS et al. 2002).
> Pack size is highly variable due to the birth of pups, but is typically between 4 to 8 wolves. Territory sizes range from 25 to 150 square miles; neighboring packs can share common borders, but territories rarely overlap by more than a mile.
This is a great point. 2.2M acres was posited to sound so vast.
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.
The science is pretty clear on this Im not sure what you exactly are criticizing other than you don't like the vibes or vaguely incredulous? It doesn't take many wolves to change the behavior of nearly every herbivore they prey upon. Which then changes the river bank erosion. Which causes hundreds of more species to change behavior.... Trophic Cascades are not really up for debate .
No one here used apex predictor, but many described it. The science is clear that we need to study this more, much more. We only know a brief glimpse on terms of geologic time.
The effect on quaking aspens in Pardo is also something we need to study long term. Are the two related?
Yes we need to study the longer term changes but the short term changes are undeniable. And focusing on geologic timescale for these improvements is inane when you look at the scale of destruction of the industrial revolution in less than a blink of an eye on the geological timescale...
This is like triage, and concern trolling the 40 or 50 year side effects of triage treatment when someone is bleeding out is negligent bordering on criminal and treasonous imo
“I do not like the results!” Or “The result does not make sense to me!” are not valid criticisms of science. They are arguments made from emotion. And in your case, based on your account history, it’s clearly something political for you. I would encourage you to write that kind of commentary in a more appropriate venue. Like the bathroom stall of your local truck stop. Just not here.
While I didn’t like the tone of OP I do understand where they’re coming from. Assuming what they’re saying is correct, it’s a valid question where explaining the mechanism is a solid response.
I’ll say that I’ve not read the article so if it’s in the article then I would rather you just point to that, rather than make this response.
But it's perfectly valid to question results that don't make sense, and the role of the supposed expert is to explain why it does.
After all, off in a democracy an expert expects to be paid by taxpayers to make decisions that affect the taxpayer the expert should be, at the very least, be able to explain himself in an intelligible manner.
Thats the bare minimum of expectations. I also expect the taxpayer funded expert to provided full access to his data, notes and analysis software.
Im considered an expert in thermodynamics, materials science and E&M. The people that pay me routinely don't understand what I'm working on, but they expect me to explain myself.
>they expect me to explain themselves
But the experts did explain themselves. They’ve published numerous studies on how small wolf populations impact the larger ecosystem.
It’s not even that hard to understand. Yes Yellowstone is large, but there are a finite number of elk herds and the wolves move to follow and prey upon the elk herds.
Wolf packs can kill 20 elk per year per wolf, there are 120 wolves inside the park and 500 immediately around the park wandering inside it and killing elk that wander outside.
At the peak there were 18k elk in the park and now the numbers are down to 2000. There’s plenty of evidence that the decline is a direct result of the wolves.
Controlling elk population has tons of 2nd and 3rd order effects which have also been well documented.
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While I find your counter argument vague, it did prompt me to dig in and find that human hunting is arguably still the bigger suppressor of elk population. However, that’s been going on since the ‘40s.
The reintroduction of wolves is associated with an immediate, steady, and durable decline in elk - i.e. pushed the ecosystem past an inflection point into a new equilibrium.
It’s also possible that wolves hunt in a different way than humans, or different types (regarding age, gender, or health maybe) of elks.
It’s an interesting question and this could be empirically tested if human hunting would be slowly reduced.
IIRC:
Without risk of harm, elk and deer linger near water. This tramples the shoreline. And they love eating noshing on (aspen) saplings. Over time, the shorelines become barren.
With the reintroduction of wolves, shorelines are no longer safe havens. Aspens have returned. With aspens, song birds have returned. Trees shade the water (eg streams), so fish are happier. Trees stabilize the top soil, reducing erosion, allows other plants to become reestablished.
I dimly recall beavers returned too.
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Aha. I was mostly right (or hallucinating). Here's perplexity link for "impact of return of wolves to yellowstone".
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/impact-of-return-of-wolves-...
I learned about the birds returning because of the wolves while volunteering at Audubon. That linked summary doesn't go into those details.
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Update: I should've read the OC first. My bad. TIL: (too many) bison also negatively impact riverbanks. I had thought (misremembered) that overall impact of bison was positive. Does Yellowstone need more cougars?
That’s a good point: hunters probably prefer strong elk but wolves prefer weak elk. I recall going to a walking with wolves experience in the Lake District where she explained that predators strengthen their prey by removing sick and those with genetic issues from the gene pool.
Yellowstone is a national park, you can’t hunt anything inside the park’s boundaries. Wolves can.
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The simple answer for how is the elk population in that 2,200,000 acres dropped from ~18,000 to ~2,000 or 1 elk per 2 square miles.
16,000 elk do quiet a lot, especially as they aren’t spending nearly as much time along river banks. Which changes what plants are in and around steams and thus what’s happening in and around those streams.