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There are arguments for the fact that the large bison populations you are referring to are actually an anomaly due to the diseases that decimated the pre-Columb

There are arguments for the fact that the large bison populations you are referring to are actually an anomaly due to the diseases that decimated the pre-Columbus people, leading to an explosion of the bison population. There was a huge collapse of the population between first contact with hispanics and the roughly 100 year later attempts at second contacts, where the explorers relying on Spanish descriptions that ended up being called lies, because the second explorers could not find any of the people described by the Spanish. The assumption for which there is increasing evidence is that as the existing human populations that were the top predator of bison collapsed, there was no other large natural predatory species to take their place after humans had also pressured the natural predatory species like bears and wolves.

eru 4y ago
I believe your story about population collapse. But what I find confusing: if the bison population had time to explode, why didn't bears and wolves also explode in number?
- jjtheblunt 4y ago
  And pumas
  - Maursault 4y ago
    Which? Cougars or Mountain Lions?
    - jjtheblunt 4y ago
      cougar = mountain lion = puma = catamount = puma concolor, in north american english anyway
      - Maursault 4y ago
        That's just crazy. What other large cat has more than one name in English? This one has... 5?!
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        More. Often "panther". And others.
        jjtheblunt 4y ago
        not sure where you are, but panther is a different clade, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera includes leopards and jaguars, usually seems they call them panthers if they're melanistic (dark hairdos). by genetics, mountain lions are the biggest in the group that includes domestic cats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felinae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felinae they purr and play and can domesticate so people do have them as pets, but of course are 70kg sized so a ton of money to feed and ton of space needed to play/exercise.
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        Yes, lots of big cats are called panthers by various people.
        jjtheblunt 4y ago
        like you said, and i'd forgotten, the mountain lion is called a "florida panther" in florida!
- richwater 4y ago
  Would depend on the average gestational time and number of births per carrier, right? I have no idea about the underlying data though.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Do bear normally live on the prairie? Strikes me as a hard landscape to be a solo ambush predator in (From a really quick Google, looks like bison and bears have the same top speed, which implies they'd have to attack from cover, as they're not exactly great coursers like wolves). Especially given that a herd of bison would be more than capable of taking on a bear, like wolves, it would have to isolate an individual to escape unscathed. Also: humans is my other guess - we have a well earned reputation for extirpating predators that compete with us.
  - zmgsabst 4y ago
    You can find both in the same area for mixed areas like Yellowstone, where there’s a blend of grassland, rivers, and forests.
    - EdwardDiego 4y ago
      I'd imagine so, but out on the "great bison belt" of grasslands, I'd be expecting far less.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      From New York to Louisiana were maintained as grasslands for the bison, via controlled burns. When smallpox swept through, trees grew. So many trees, it caused a little ice age for 200 years.
  - jandrewrogers 4y ago
    Canids hunt on the prairie, wolves and coyotes. Bears aren’t usually found there, preferring forested regions though you see them in the boundary areas between forest and grasslands. Pronghorn are stupendously fast — second fastest animal, and they can maintain that speed over long distances — as an evolved defense against very fast predators, like the American Cheetah, which disappeared around the last ice age. Pronghorn tend to follow bison, only feeding after the bison have eaten the tall grass. This greatly reduces predation on pronghorn from ambush predators hiding in the grass; if they can see the predator with sufficient time, they are nearly impossible to run down.
- stevenwoo 4y ago
  After watching Frozen Planet II - they only got brown bears on film killing musk ox calves, no adults, (edit:also reindeer calves) and it took what are called super packs of twenty plus wolves to take down one bison, it took that many to first get one separate from the rest of the pack of bison and it was not that many bison. The wolves also had a low success rate.
  - carapace 4y ago
    There were predators large enough to prey on bison but they went extinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilodon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilodon
peteradio 4y ago
Why wouldn't wolves or bears have come roaring back on the heals of a bison explosion?
- ethbr0 4y ago
  Because there were fewer of them to start with (predator:prey ratio is low at the apex), so it would take more generations (which are relatively slow) to appreciably increase, even under population growth-promoting conditions. Start doubling 10 vs 100, and see where you get after a few rounds.
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago
    Ah, and of course, they tend to reproduce slower,because if you reproduce too fast, you exceed the carrying capacity of your prey, and everyone starves.
    - cwillu 4y ago
      Danger, Will Robinson! While your statement is true in the sense that we wouldn't see them if they had all previously starved, it's not true that they don't reproduce too fast _because_ they would starve if they did. Evolution doesn't have lookahead, it can't predict consequences and avoid them.
      - moloch-hai 4y ago
        A lineage that reproduces too fast might be displaced by a slower one from elsewhere when it is weakest.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Humans? We tend to hunt competing predators (and animals that prey on us) to near-extinction, because that's our bloody bison/sheep/cow/goat...
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
timeon 4y ago
> There was a huge collapse of the population between first contact with hispanics and the roughly 100 year later attempts at second contacts, where the explorers relying on Spanish descriptions that ended up being called lies, because the second explorers could not find any of the people described by the Spanish. Sounds like first expedition might have introduced new disease.
- frankfrankfrank 4y ago
  I don’t think that can be concluded, the Spanish appear to have made little to no contact with natives during those early exploratory ventures that weren’t really expeditions in that sense, but rather more scouting. So, e.g., they described being on large bluffs overlooking the horizon and setting an immense number of smoke columns rising, as would be expected from tribal communities, which were then not at all witnessed 100 years later. I also don’t think it’s conclusive that it was disease or disease alone, it’s the rather blind assumption today that it must have been disease and somehow that makes Europeans culpable for something they also didn’t understand, but there are any number of things that could have happened in 100 years that led to such changes. It seems more plausible to assume that semi-nomadic hunter gatherer societies that were extremely conflict prone would have likely moved, been overrun by hostile tribes and/or been decimated in wars with other tribes, faced hunger, followed livestock, or simply just moved. In spite of the semi-religious nature of what I’ll call native-worship, (and don’t get me wrong, I find them fascinating for different reasons) fact of the matter is that the indigenous people were very underdeveloped relative to the European state, and as such were confronted with all the similar trappings of hunter-gatherer societies that didn’t even have the wheel, let alone a writing system or even bronze weapons. They were in effect Stone Age people, dealing with Stone Age systems and parameters. And that doesn’t even go into the fact that genetic testing has shown that the mass extinction event of the Americas due to what were Asian pathogens that Europeans almost didn’t survive either, was inevitable because any contact prior to the technology of the last few decades would have resulted in the same outcome.
- noworld 4y ago
  I think a lot of this is from 1491: https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059 https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colu... It's been a while since I read it but IIRC, the theory is that some of the pigs the Spanish brought with them got loose and went wild, but brought the flu with them. As wild boar spread so did the disease.

eru 4y ago

I believe your story about population collapse. But what I find confusing: if the bison population had time to explode, why didn't bears and wolves also explode in number?

jjtheblunt 4y ago
And pumas
- Maursault 4y ago
  Which? Cougars or Mountain Lions?
  - jjtheblunt 4y ago
    cougar = mountain lion = puma = catamount = puma concolor, in north american english anyway
    - Maursault 4y ago
      That's just crazy. What other large cat has more than one name in English? This one has... 5?!
      - moloch-hai 4y ago
        More. Often "panther". And others.
        jjtheblunt 4y ago
        not sure where you are, but panther is a different clade, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panthera includes leopards and jaguars, usually seems they call them panthers if they're melanistic (dark hairdos). by genetics, mountain lions are the biggest in the group that includes domestic cats. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felinae https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Felinae they purr and play and can domesticate so people do have them as pets, but of course are 70kg sized so a ton of money to feed and ton of space needed to play/exercise.
        moloch-hai 4y ago
        Yes, lots of big cats are called panthers by various people.
        jjtheblunt 4y ago
        like you said, and i'd forgotten, the mountain lion is called a "florida panther" in florida!
richwater 4y ago
Would depend on the average gestational time and number of births per carrier, right? I have no idea about the underlying data though.
EdwardDiego 4y ago
Do bear normally live on the prairie? Strikes me as a hard landscape to be a solo ambush predator in (From a really quick Google, looks like bison and bears have the same top speed, which implies they'd have to attack from cover, as they're not exactly great coursers like wolves). Especially given that a herd of bison would be more than capable of taking on a bear, like wolves, it would have to isolate an individual to escape unscathed. Also: humans is my other guess - we have a well earned reputation for extirpating predators that compete with us.
- zmgsabst 4y ago
  You can find both in the same area for mixed areas like Yellowstone, where there’s a blend of grassland, rivers, and forests.
  - EdwardDiego 4y ago
    I'd imagine so, but out on the "great bison belt" of grasslands, I'd be expecting far less.
  - moloch-hai 4y ago
    From New York to Louisiana were maintained as grasslands for the bison, via controlled burns. When smallpox swept through, trees grew. So many trees, it caused a little ice age for 200 years.
- jandrewrogers 4y ago
  Canids hunt on the prairie, wolves and coyotes. Bears aren’t usually found there, preferring forested regions though you see them in the boundary areas between forest and grasslands. Pronghorn are stupendously fast — second fastest animal, and they can maintain that speed over long distances — as an evolved defense against very fast predators, like the American Cheetah, which disappeared around the last ice age. Pronghorn tend to follow bison, only feeding after the bison have eaten the tall grass. This greatly reduces predation on pronghorn from ambush predators hiding in the grass; if they can see the predator with sufficient time, they are nearly impossible to run down.
stevenwoo 4y ago
After watching Frozen Planet II - they only got brown bears on film killing musk ox calves, no adults, (edit:also reindeer calves) and it took what are called super packs of twenty plus wolves to take down one bison, it took that many to first get one separate from the rest of the pack of bison and it was not that many bison. The wolves also had a low success rate.
- carapace 4y ago
  There were predators large enough to prey on bison but they went extinct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilodon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smilodon

peteradio 4y ago

Why wouldn't wolves or bears have come roaring back on the heals of a bison explosion?

ethbr0 4y ago
Because there were fewer of them to start with (predator:prey ratio is low at the apex), so it would take more generations (which are relatively slow) to appreciably increase, even under population growth-promoting conditions. Start doubling 10 vs 100, and see where you get after a few rounds.
- EdwardDiego 4y ago
  Ah, and of course, they tend to reproduce slower,because if you reproduce too fast, you exceed the carrying capacity of your prey, and everyone starves.
  - cwillu 4y ago
    Danger, Will Robinson! While your statement is true in the sense that we wouldn't see them if they had all previously starved, it's not true that they don't reproduce too fast _because_ they would starve if they did. Evolution doesn't have lookahead, it can't predict consequences and avoid them.
    - moloch-hai 4y ago
      A lineage that reproduces too fast might be displaced by a slower one from elsewhere when it is weakest.
EdwardDiego 4y ago
Humans? We tend to hunt competing predators (and animals that prey on us) to near-extinction, because that's our bloody bison/sheep/cow/goat...
- moloch-hai 4y ago

timeon 4y ago

> There was a huge collapse of the population between first contact with hispanics and the roughly 100 year later attempts at second contacts, where the explorers relying on Spanish descriptions that ended up being called lies, because the second explorers could not find any of the people described by the Spanish. Sounds like first expedition might have introduced new disease.

frankfrankfrank 4y ago
I don’t think that can be concluded, the Spanish appear to have made little to no contact with natives during those early exploratory ventures that weren’t really expeditions in that sense, but rather more scouting. So, e.g., they described being on large bluffs overlooking the horizon and setting an immense number of smoke columns rising, as would be expected from tribal communities, which were then not at all witnessed 100 years later. I also don’t think it’s conclusive that it was disease or disease alone, it’s the rather blind assumption today that it must have been disease and somehow that makes Europeans culpable for something they also didn’t understand, but there are any number of things that could have happened in 100 years that led to such changes. It seems more plausible to assume that semi-nomadic hunter gatherer societies that were extremely conflict prone would have likely moved, been overrun by hostile tribes and/or been decimated in wars with other tribes, faced hunger, followed livestock, or simply just moved. In spite of the semi-religious nature of what I’ll call native-worship, (and don’t get me wrong, I find them fascinating for different reasons) fact of the matter is that the indigenous people were very underdeveloped relative to the European state, and as such were confronted with all the similar trappings of hunter-gatherer societies that didn’t even have the wheel, let alone a writing system or even bronze weapons. They were in effect Stone Age people, dealing with Stone Age systems and parameters. And that doesn’t even go into the fact that genetic testing has shown that the mass extinction event of the Americas due to what were Asian pathogens that Europeans almost didn’t survive either, was inevitable because any contact prior to the technology of the last few decades would have resulted in the same outcome.
noworld 4y ago
I think a lot of this is from 1491: https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Columbus/dp/1400032059 https://www.amazon.com/1491-Revelations-Americas-Before-Colu... It's been a while since I read it but IIRC, the theory is that some of the pigs the Spanish brought with them got loose and went wild, but brought the flu with them. As wild boar spread so did the disease.