Nature rebalances extremely fast but its does so by catastrophically changing into a different state instead of having old niches be refilled. One of the famous

Nature rebalances extremely fast but its does so by catastrophically changing into a different state instead of having old niches be refilled. One of the famous examples is how experimentally removing starfish (a sea urchin predator) from a kelp forest resulted in an explosion of the sea urchin population and a transformation of the kelp forest into a "sea urchin desert". There was a nice article linked in HN about this recently: http://nautil.us/issue/37/currents/the-ecologist-who-threw-starfish-rp http://nautil.us/issue/37/currents/the-ecologist-who-threw-s... https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11824375 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11824375