4 ms·

The "wolves fix Yellowstone" narrative may be oversimplyfying things. https://mobile.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/opinion/is-the-wolf-a-real-american-hero.html?_r=3&r

• jimnotgym 9y ago
  > and found that elk rarely changed their feeding behavior in response to wolves. Perhaps a more useful study would have been to compare elkfeeding behavior pre-1995 to post wolf introduction. By 2007 maybe the Elk had just got the hang of living around wolves. Maybe their behavior had already changed?
  • swerner 9y ago
    Those are the questions we'll never be able to answer for sure. All we can observe are correlations and cannot draw certain causations from it. Ecosystems are complex and its variables change constantly. The appearance of wolves was one notable change, but not the only one. Others have suggested drought as a possible factor for the change in elk population. Which one of the explanations is the truth, I can't possibly tell. Both sound plausible to a layman, and neither can be proven definitively.