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  • One of the most exciting scientific findings of the past half century has been the discovery

  • of widespread trophic cascades.

  • A trophic cascade is an ecological process which starts at the top of the food chain

  • and tumbles all the way down to the bottom.

  • And the classic example is what happened in the Yellowstone National Park

  • in the United States when wolves were reintroduced in 1995.

  • Now, we all know that wolves kill various species of animals, but perhaps we're slightly

  • less aware

  • that they give life to many others.

  • Before the wolves turned up - they'd been absent for 70 years -

  • the numbers of deer (because there had been nothing to hunt them) had built up and built

  • up in the Yellowstone Park

  • and despite efforts by humans to control them

  • they'd managed to reduce much the vegitation there to almost nothing. They had just grazed

  • it away.

  • But as soon as the wolves arrived, even though they were few in number

  • they started to have the most remarkable effects.

  • First, of course, they killed some of the deer but that wasn't the major thing.

  • Much more significantly, they radically changed the behavior of the deer.

  • The deer started avoiding certain parts of the park - the places where they could be

  • trapped most easily -

  • particularly the valleys and the gorges

  • and immediately those places started to regenerate.

  • In some areas, the height of the trees quintupled in just six years.

  • Bare valley sides quickly became forests of aspen and willow and cottonwood.

  • And as soon as that happened, the birds started moving in.

  • The number of songbirds and migratory birds started to increase greatly.

  • The number of beavers started to increase because beavers like to eat the trees.

  • And beavers, like wolves, are ecosystem engineers.

  • They create niches for other species.

  • And the dams they built in the rivers provided habitats for otters and muscrats and ducks

  • and fish and reptiles and amphibians.

  • The wolves killed coyotes and as a result of that, the number rabbits and mice began

  • to rise

  • which meant more hawks

  • more weasels

  • more foxes

  • more badgers

  • Ravens and bald eagles came down to feed on the carrion that the wolves had left.

  • Bears fed on it, too. And their population began to rise as well

  • partly also because there were more berries growing on the regenerating shrubs.

  • And the bears reinforced the impact of the wolves by killing some of the calves of the

  • deer.

  • But here's where it gets really interesting.

  • The wolves changed the behavior of the rivers.

  • They began to meander less. There was less erosion.

  • The channels narrowed. More pools formed. More riffle sections.

  • All of which were great for wildlife habitats.

  • The rivers changed in response to the wolves.

  • And the reason was that the regenerating forests stabilized the banks so that they collapsed

  • less often.

  • So the rivers became more fixed in their course.

  • Similarly, by driving the deer out of some places,

  • and the vegetation recovering on the valley side,

  • there was less soil erosion because the vegitation stabilized that as well.

  • So the wolves, small in number, transformed not just the ecosystem of the Yellowstone

  • National Park

  • -This huge area of land... but also, its physical geography.

One of the most exciting scientific findings of the past half century has been the discovery

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オオカミはどのようにして川を変えるのか (How Wolves Change Rivers)

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    Chou YU に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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