Wednesday, February 26, 2014

How Wolves Change Rivers - Trophic Cascade

How Wolves Change Rivers.  Or... "How destructive uncontrolled deer populations can be to an ecosystem".



This video was brought to my attention by my friend John Kress.  It's produced by "Sustainable Man".  Very nice indeed.  Excellent scientific work that went into all of the factual observations, recorded data, and scientific method applied.   (you mean, they didn't just trust in a Bible story for guidance on how to observe the actual changes, over time?)

Whenever I hear a former Wasilla Alaska mayor (a town with NO City Services whatsoever, relying entirely on the county & state to help the citizenery) turned partial single term governor, talk about how she enjoys shooting wolves, I begin to mourn for the loss of insight, the lack of focus on science, and perpetual dumbing down of the United States electorate.  At least she helped prevent a McCain presidency (and a war with Iran that would have resulted)... even if she's really bad at everything else she's tried to do.

If you're afraid of wolves, that's natural for an uninformed human to feel fear of a pack of large predatory carnivores who are poorly understood by most people.  But in the last 100 years in North America, there's been exactly 2 people killed by wolves (link here).  In comparison: "in North America, since 1990, bears (black and grizzly) killed 59 people and cougars killed 11. In the U.S., domestic dogs kill 20 to 30 people every year. And hunters kill nearly 100 people in the U.S. and Canada every year and injure around 1,000."  Appears homo sapiens are still the most lethal species on this planet, after viruses and bacteria (on average).

1 comment:

  1. you might need to "refresh" your screen... if you loaded the page Right After I posted it... since the Youtube video did not immediately load.

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