Where the Wild Things Were
Posted: Mar 20 2010 10:28 pm
The full title is "Where the Wild Things Were: Life, Death, and Ecological Wreckage in a Land of Vanishing Predators" by William Stolzenburg.
I cannot recommend this book highly-enough to those folks who are interested in the subject. It's enjoyable, yet horrifying at the same time.
The subject of this book is basically how us humanss have screwed the environment (and ourselves) by removing so many predators from ecosystems.
We've removed the wolves and cougars (largely...) from the eastern US, and now white tail deer are deadly hazards for motorists and many species of plants.
We removed wolves from Yellowstone, saw certain habitats be virtually destroyed, re-introduced the wolves, and have seen those certain habitats rebound.
Orcas, kelp, sea otters, whales, and how their interaction has affected the jacked-up thing that has become the North Pacific Ocean ecosystem.
My favorite was how Stolzenburg describes Thomas Paine's experiments with tidal predators and prey by manipulating the distribution of the starfish Pisaster ochracues. If you were a mussel, then pisaster would be a god of doom for you. This starfish inexorably crawls up the tidal area, covers a mussel, and then begins to slowly pull apart the mussel's shell until it's open wide-enough for its stomach to go externally into the mussel's shell to begin digesting the meat. Sounds pretty dreadful, but Dr. Paine's experiements of clearing certain areas of Pisaster ochracues while leaving others areas intact has served as the backbone of the study of modern predator-prey relationships.
The best thing about this book is its readability. There's no punchline at the end, and there's no mystery. Stolzenburg hammers home his point that removing predators from an ecosystem has seriously deleterious consequences with countless examples which range from killer whales eating everything from herring to blue whales to starfish to concrete examples of biogeographical isolation.
If you want to learn the meaning of the term "trophic cascade" then this book is for you. I couldn't put it down.
I cannot recommend this book highly-enough to those folks who are interested in the subject. It's enjoyable, yet horrifying at the same time.
The subject of this book is basically how us humanss have screwed the environment (and ourselves) by removing so many predators from ecosystems.
We've removed the wolves and cougars (largely...) from the eastern US, and now white tail deer are deadly hazards for motorists and many species of plants.
We removed wolves from Yellowstone, saw certain habitats be virtually destroyed, re-introduced the wolves, and have seen those certain habitats rebound.
Orcas, kelp, sea otters, whales, and how their interaction has affected the jacked-up thing that has become the North Pacific Ocean ecosystem.
My favorite was how Stolzenburg describes Thomas Paine's experiments with tidal predators and prey by manipulating the distribution of the starfish Pisaster ochracues. If you were a mussel, then pisaster would be a god of doom for you. This starfish inexorably crawls up the tidal area, covers a mussel, and then begins to slowly pull apart the mussel's shell until it's open wide-enough for its stomach to go externally into the mussel's shell to begin digesting the meat. Sounds pretty dreadful, but Dr. Paine's experiements of clearing certain areas of Pisaster ochracues while leaving others areas intact has served as the backbone of the study of modern predator-prey relationships.
The best thing about this book is its readability. There's no punchline at the end, and there's no mystery. Stolzenburg hammers home his point that removing predators from an ecosystem has seriously deleterious consequences with countless examples which range from killer whales eating everything from herring to blue whales to starfish to concrete examples of biogeographical isolation.
If you want to learn the meaning of the term "trophic cascade" then this book is for you. I couldn't put it down.