In two thousand one, a couple named Charlie Burrell and Isabella Tree stood on the edge of three thousand five hundred acres of exhausted farmland in West Sussex, England, land that Burrell's family had owned for over two hundred years, and made a decision that their neighbors thought was insane. They stopped farming.

Excerpt from this story from the Smithsonian Magazine:

For the first time in 80 years, baby aspens are growing tall and healthy in the northern part of the park, scientists report in the journal Forest Ecology and Management. They’ve linked the trees’ resurgence with the reintroduction of gray wolves (Canis lupus), which are keeping Yellowstone’s plant-eating elk in check.

Gray wolves were once abundant in Yellowstone National Park. But by the 1930s, the apex predators had been extirpated from the area, largely due to hunting, government eradication programs and habitat loss.

Without the wolves, the park’s elk population ballooned, reaching around 17,000 individuals in winter 1995. The huge numbers of elk wreaked havoc on Yellowstone’s quaking aspen trees (Populus tremuloides) by chowing down on saplings before they had a chance to get established. When ecologists conducted surveys in the 1990s, they couldn’t find a single aspen sapling in the park.

“[The aspens] would grow new sprouts, but then the sprouts couldn’t get any larger [because of the elk],” says lead author Luke Painter, an ecologist at Oregon State University, to Oregon on the Record’s Michael Dunne. “The stands basically had older trees … and those were dying out, and then there wasn’t any new growth underneath, of young aspens, to replace those older trees.”

Then, in 1995, biologists reintroduced gray wolves to the park. The carnivores quickly made meals out of Yellowstone’s abundant elk, helping drive their population down to the roughly 2,000 individuals that spend winter in the park now. With fewer elk grazing, aspen saplings have been able to regain a foothold, the study authors suggest.

Scientists had previously surveyed 87 aspen stands in northern Yellowstone in 2012. When the new study’s team returned in 2020 and 2021, 43 percent of the sample sites had new, young trees with trunks that were at least two inches in diameter at chest height—something researchers hadn’t seen since the 1940s.

They also documented a more than 152-fold increase in the density of aspen saplings between 1998 and 2021.

“It doesn’t mean that they’re not going to get killed or die from something, but it’s a pretty good indication that we’re getting some new trees,” Painter says to Live Science’s Chris Simms. “As they get bigger, they get more resilient.”

The recovery of aspens in Yellowstone will likely benefit other species, too, including birds such as woodpeckers and tree swallows, which make cavity nests in aspen trunks. It will probably also be a boon to beavers, which eat the trees’ bark and small branches and use larger sections for their dams.

Scientists say their findings are evidence of a “trophic cascade,” or a series of ripple effects caused by a change at the top of the food web.

Kung Pow Penis

Conservation Status: Threatened

Classification: Native

Kung Pow Penis originated as a small population of memes from a shitpost about Bernie Sanders. The meme did not have a significant ecological niche and was not observed to engage in predation until reports from field memeologists indicated that the memes had adapted to feed on fascists.

From this point onward, Kung Pow Penis became much more prevalent, appearing every time a particular fascist tumblr user posted. However, the subsequent loss of this habitat severely impacted the population of Kung Pow Penis in the wild.

However, we here at TACM believe that Kung Pow Penis memes remain capable of surviving in similar habitats, such as the posts of other fascist, reactionary, TERF, and incel tumblr users.

So, a few thoughts I have on this article. First,it says something about our bias when we refer to deer eating crops meant for livestock as "depredation," particularly during an incredibly long, harsh winter. At least the article points out that the lack of habitat--and therefore natural food sources--is a root cause of this issue.

Wildlife can handle a lot of what we throw at them if they have suitable habitat to retreat to. It doesn't justify all the ways in which we make their lives more difficult, but it at least gives them some space to recover both individually and as a population. Habitat loss is the single biggest cause of species endangerment and extinction, and when we remove that habitat, only a handful of species will be able to adapt to less suitable habitat types. That's why the native biodiversity found in a suburb or city is a tiny fraction of what was there prior to development.

So the call to increase and improve habitat for the deer, particularly when it emphasizes natural food sources, is a good one. However, the article completely misses another important factor: the lack of natural predators. Wolves, mountain lions, and other major predators of deer have been exterminated from large areas of their historic range in the United States, and while they are beginning to reclaim some of their old territory, it's far from a full recovery. The lack of predators is directly linked to the overpopulation of white-tailed deer in particular, though other deer species such as elk may also see overpopulation in some areas.

Food, disease, and predation are three natural forces that usually keep deer populations in check. Because deer may be able to find artificial food sources (such as crops) and predators are few to none in much of the US, disease ends up being a major cause of deer mortality, especially as diseases like Chronic Wasting Disease continue to decimate deer populations. Normally predatory animals like wolves would be able to remove some sick animals from the equation, as well as more vulnerable animals that are more likely to become ill in the future. But their absence has caused a severe imbalance in ecosystems across the continent.

The return of large predatory animals to their historic range is a contentious one. Ranchers complain about the loss of livestock; hunters blame wolves for any empty-handed hunt. There's also general pearl-clutching due to fear for the safety of children and pets, in spite of the fact that attacks on humans are exceedingly rare, and pets can be kept safe through reasonable measures. Even as we argue about whether these animals should be reintroduced to former homes, some of them are beginning to move back to those areas whether we want them to or not.

New design up on my Threadless shop! There's a sale going on right now too :)

Thank you @madlymerc for the idea!

A Coconut crab (Birgus latro) -a land-dwelling crustacean- has been filmed hunting and predating in an adult red-footed booby (Sula sula), on a small island In Chagos Archipelago, Indian Ocean. 

It is the first time such predatory behaviour has been observed in the species,  the discovery has significant implications for how they may affect ecosystems where they dwell. The coconut crab is the world's largest terrestrial invertebrate, growing to what Charles Darwin described as “a monstrous size” (Darwin 1845), with a leg span exceeding 1 m and a weight of up to 4 kg.

Researcher who made the discovery suggests that the crabs, who were previously thought to be scavengers, may dominate their ecosystems and could discourage other animals, particularly seabirds, from inhabiting islands where they would be forced to nest on the ground.