Sustainable Human
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 16 months, 2014–2022
4:34 · 46M views · Feb 13, 2014
George Monbiot narrates how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone after about 70 years set off a trophic cascade. The wolves changed deer behavior, vegetation recovered, and rivers changed course.
HN cites it as the go-to example of how one keystone species can reshape an entire ecosystem.
17 comments from Hacker News
In hindsight this looks like the idle ramblings of someone out of touch with reality. But in truth it's closer to the opposite - I've spent too much time analyzing the repercussions of everything because that's what programmers do. If someone ever finds this, this video sums up a lot of what I was trying to say: this video Now multiply that by every ecosystem that has been tampered with by humans across the face of the planet and decide for yourself if our climate has been affected.
This could be good for Colorado. I had to watch this video [1] for my biology class. It's interesting how the wolves changed the entire ecosystem by just changing the behavior of deer (they avoided grazing near the river because that's where the wolves wanted to be). The ripple effects are fairly significant. 1 - this video
You need to learn about trophic cascades. Here's a quick intro: this video This played out in the Pleistocene extinctions to a very significant degree, having tremendous effect on ecosystems everywhere. Here's an entire conference worth of the subject: [LINK]
I saw a pretty cool documentary on how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone changed the ecosystem for the better. Not the one I saw but very similar: this video More serious article: [LINK]
Keystone species are fascinating and show how we really need more systemic thinking. The one that tons of people have seen is how reintroducing wolves into Yellowstone changed the course of rivers, made them less eroding, and generally increased ecosystem diversity: this video Beavers are another one: [LINK] Remember how we learned a lot of westward expansion in US colonial days was led by mountainmen trapping beavers to use their pelts in fancy european hats and we kept going further west because we kept killing off the beavers while demand for fancy hats kept going up? Turns out when you remove all those beaver ponds that would slow down water flow, you end up with a lot more erosion, incision, and flooding -- the landscape we have now. Fisherman think beaver ponds decrease fish populations because they tend to have warmer water, but this doesn't quite pass the thousands-years-of-coevolution-before-beaver-extermination sniff test... some experiments have showed that beaver ponds actually increase fish stock because they create lots of fish nurseries, and trout and salmon can instinctively swim up through beaver dams. Then when you consider how things like aquaponics incorporate fish because fish poop makes great fertilizer, it starts to become clear how important beaver ponds can be to nutrient cycling in these ecosystems. One of the most fascinating fish-based nutrient flows is salmon migrations... they're hatched upstream, put on most of their growth and biomass in the ocean