(Photo: Matthew J. Lee/The Boston Globe via Getty Images)
People have been suppressing predators since our terrified ancestors first banded together around campfires. Oddly, though, we only began to notice the catastrophic aftereffects in the 1960s. That’s when biologists first demonstrated that taking out a top predator has a knock-on effect for almost every plant and animal below it on the trophic ladder, or food web.
It’s called a “trophic cascade,” and when settlers eradicated wolves from the Lower 48, they set off a cascade on “a continental scale,” according to a new study published in the Journal of Animal Ecology. Where the wolf’s howl once could be heard from the Arctic to the Gulf of Mexico and from Cape Cod to the Olympic Peninsula, the night went silent. And coyotes, once confined to the Great Plains, were suddenly free to increase their populations almost astronomically, extending their range from coast to coast and north into Alaska.
Wolves out, coyotes in. Almost a wash, right?
On the contrary, coyotes are “mesopredators,” meaning midsize, and they favor smaller prey than do wolves. So the proliferation of coyotes caused a
