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Comment by ckinnan | Hacker News Reader

There is actually a similar problem in the Northeastern United States. Deer are overpopulated (in my area 6x traditional level) because they have no predators and hunting is restricted. The deer eat all of the hardwood saplings. In many mid-Atlantic forests there are very few 10-20 year old hard wood trees, they don't survive the deer.

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Reminds me the story of reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone [1]. Imapact was relatively large to the whole ecosystem with many unexpected surprises, mostly positive.

[1] https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolf-reintroduc...

And the deer overpopulation also contributes to the Lyme disease tick problem.

Which we have a perfectly good vaccine for but it was shelved purely out of FUD!

http://legacy.wbur.org/2012/06/27/lyme-vaccine

"Perfectly good" is an overstatement. Efficacy wasn't that great (80% or so) and there was some evidence of side effects. Overall, the vaccine should almost certainly have not been taken off the market but it's not a near-perfect vaccine vs. FUD story either.

See, for example: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2870557/

You may not need a higher efficacy, herd immunity does not require 100%.

Chart of herd immunity thresholds for some diseases:

https://www-tc.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/assets/img/herd-immunity/im...

Lyme disease isn't passed from human to human so herd immunity is irrelevant.

My mistake, I thought it was a vaccine for the deer.

As I understand it the vector is mice, not deer. There's a correlation between mouse populations where the juveniles feed and Lyme disease outbreaks 2 years later when the adults latch onto humans.

lyme disease can be passed human to human as a std or the womb from mother to child

(citation needed)

Lyme disease is NOT sexually transmitted. https://www.cdc.gov/lyme/faq/index.html

oh_sigh is correct, humans are a dead end host for lyme. It's primarily maintained in a mouse reservoir - the larval and nymph ticks feed on infected mice, and then the nymph and adult ticks can expose humans and deer. Deer are not really a big reservoir either, since mostly adult ticks feed on them, but they do move ticks around.

Edit: you can actually try to vaccinate the reservoir, however: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/24523510

> Overall, the vaccine should almost certainly have not been taken off the market

It's no longer patented so nothing is stopping you from selling it if you think there's a market.

Read "should not" as it's unfortunate that potential legal issues around Lymerix were such that a vaccine was a losing business proposition. In general, human vaccines aren't a great opportunity for pharma companies--to the point where they're protected against liability for common vaccines.

it was recalled because it was causing damages. the article is wrong. they found that body tissues has similar protein structures as the target for the vaccine, and left some people in wheel chairs. there are some developments for an improved vaccine but not out yet.

There's a really interesting article about how Yellowstone (a national park in the US) reintroduced wolves into the ecosystem, reducing the dear population, altering the ecosystem for the better:

https://www.yellowstonepark.com/things-to-do/wolf-reintroduc...

https://youtu.be/ysa5OBhXz-Q

Then the farmers started shooting the wolves. Circle of life.

Like all things, there is another side to the story too.

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/03/10/opinion/is-the-wolf-a-rea...

And as is often the case with science, here's another more recent study (2015, vs 2010 cited in the NY Times piece) which largely confirms the prior results noting Aspen regrowth.

http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1890/14-0712.1/abstrac...

The NY Times opinion piece is clickbaity for its absolutist declaration that the prior studies are untrue, based on one new study.

Went into that article ready to argue, but I had to quote this line from it:

"But by insisting that wolves fixed a broken Yellowstone, we distract attention from the area’s many other important conservation challenges. The warmest temperatures in 6,000 years are changing forests and grasslands. Fungus and beetle infestations are causing the decline of whitebark pine. Natural gas drilling is affecting the winter ranges of migratory wildlife. To protect cattle from disease, our government agencies still kill many bison that migrate out of the park in search of food. And invasive lake trout may be wreaking more havoc on the ecosystem than was ever caused by the loss of wolves."

Great read, thank you for posting!

The NE also went from 30% forest to 70% open/farming land to 70% forest 30% open in about 100 years as agriculturalism gave way to industrialization. So that could also contribute to giving deer more cover/habitat. Also we killed all the wolves east of the Mississippi 50 years, and coyotes have yet to fill their niche.

Wolf sized coyotes that hunt in packs. Not sure I like that.

> The NE also went from 30% forest to 70% open/farming land to 70% forest 30% open in about 100 years as agriculturalism gave way to industrialization.

Source? It would surprise me to see that many people voluntarily give up their farmland rather than, say, selling it to industrial farmers or real estate developers.

Lot's of people gave up on farming hardscrabble New England in the early part of the 20th century which resulted in reforestation. Farming is making a comeback in niche products, but nothing at the previous scales. This article (sorry for the paywall) gives a good summary: http://www.bostonglobe.com/ideas/2014/11/21/how-new-england-....

You're right - farmers generally didn't just let the fields lie fallow and become forested. Piece by piece, farmers sold their most marginal lands to housing developers, commercial ventures, etc.

Away from the coasts there's plenty of space. If it was low yield farmland far from a population centre abandoning it makes sense.

The landscape was largely unsuitable for large scale farming (tiny fields with thin soils among rough terrain), and most farming areas aren't near cities.

If you are driving thru New England and pull over to any forest you can start walking and eventually you will find a short stone wall. These stone walls used to mark the borders of farm land but now they are in the middle of the forest. They are everywhere! Really gives you an idea of how much farming used to go on there.

Of course, that is anecdotal, you can read more here: https://www.bostonglobe.com/metro/2013/08/31/new-england-see...

Mostly true.

In my area, once you get passed a point south of me, those walls are fewer and fewer. There are areas where it was never farmed and old growth trees still exist.

What is great is you can walk out to places and stand there and be reasonably certain that you're the first human to have ever stood in that spot.

Possibly, but there has been a lot of humans walking around North America the last 12,000 years or so.

I'm way up outside Rangeley, Maine. I even have true old growth and there weren't many natives in the area. So, there are some places where it's a good guess. They aren't easy to get to, of course.

I grew up in Vermont and the woods are full of old stone walls put up by farmers and cellar holes where their buildings used to be. Not just on the edge of the woods, but deep within them too. I'm not a student of farming but I don't think that New England is a particularly good place to do it. Lots of hills and mountains and rocky soil. As for real estate developers, there's a lot more money to be made in heavily populated areas of the country. Taking VT as an example, the state contains fewer residents than the Boise, ID metropolitan area does, and the largest city has fewer than 45K people.

edit: removed link to an article that has been posted several times.

Real estate developers pale in comparison to the sheer amount of land in the US. Hell, even just on the "wrong side of the tracks" in many very expensive cities there's often completely abandoned/disused land that's worth a tiny fraction of the land a half mile a way.

Once you get somewhere more rural/remote, the land is going to have even less value.

Just find some photos of places in the countryside of Maine, New Hampshire, Vermont, or Massachusetts from 1900 and compare to the same places today.

Or go walking through the forest, and count how many stone walls you have to clamber over. Every one used to mark the edges of a field or a pasture that was hacked out of the forest, and then was allowed to grow back up when farming the cold, rocky soil of New England was no longer cost-effective.

It's because it was never really good farm land to begin with. With the advent of the Erie canal, railroads, and industrial farming techniques the competition from the really excellent farm lands of the Midwest made farming NE rocky terrain impractical.

Do areas of the NE not allow seasonal suburban hunts?

In VA, many local parks are opened to bow hunting through winter [1] in an effort to control the deer population. Signs posted all over parks to warn users [2].

1- https://www.fairfaxcounty.gov/living/wildlife/archery/archer... 2- http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-bOyirfPSn0g/Vhv3vlBCh0I/AAAAAAAA0Q...

We have very similar signs in the Blue Hills Reservation just outside Boston, but the hours are rather more restricted (I think it's just Tuesdays). So it's not completely unheard of even in the relatively urban Northeast, probably because the deer situation really is getting that dire.

It appears a simple solution of allowing hunting to occur would solve the problem. Why is hunting restricted?

I don't know what the case is in NE US, but in my town in British Columbia, the deer population is out of control in the metropolitan area, and every time a cull is mentioned, animal rights activists put a stop to it through loud and effective lobbying. It's quite irritating.

I suppose wolves wouldn't be popular in a suburban environment either.

Coywolf start to be a thing in those environments, a rare case of species created by human sprawl.

There are tons of coyotes in suburban environments though. I live smack dab in the middle of the suburbs and we have see coyotes all the time.

They live in NYC and Chicago:

https://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/08/nyregion/that-howling-jus...

http://abc7chicago.com/archive/7945162/

We have an urban coyote population in Vancouver. It's very strange seeing a coyote in the city. I was 20 feet away, once. They are amazingly beautiful creatures.

Plenty of mountain lions in suburban California. I've seen them in Palo Alto and Cupertino (in the mountains that are on the edges of the cities).

The people decided it was better to live with mountain lions instead of killing them off in 1990, after we killed off the grizzly and the wolf in the state. http://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/billNavClient.xhtml?...

The grizzly, as a top predator, was not really very afraid of humans and many people were killed by them in California before they were hunted to extinction. I would definitely not want them around as a farmer in the 1800's. With antibiotics, helicopter transport, and ER rooms today, I might support a reintroduction of grizzlies to the state. There is one on the state flag, after all, and are amazing creatures. On the other hand, I like how relaxed I can be hiking in the California Sierra without them. Hiking and camping in the Canadian Rockies feels a lot different.

Mountain lions (at least the ones evolved when we hunted them for the last 12,000 years) are much less hazardous to humans than grizzlies or wolf packs.

No, but there's a few cougars. They're generally not allowed to stay in urban areas unless they can keep totally out of sight though.

Even if they were allowed to hunt deer, it probably wouldn't help. So much of the land deer graze over in the Midwest is suburban and have laws in place regarding setting off a firearm.

This limits hunting to public lands, of which, there might be 2-3 within an hour drive of the city. So no matter how much the hunters kill, they aren't likely to effect the populations in the surrounding suburbs.

There are more hunting spots in the rural areas, but those areas are also populated by natural hunters, like wild dogs and large cats.

There are tons of solutions that aren't hunting, but animal rights activists are just as shrill about those.

Where are these animal rights activists? I'm from PA, the state with more deer than any other, where the white-tailed deer is the official state animal, and I've never seen anyone shed a single tear over a deer hunt.

You can still bowhunt, or at least you ought to be able to...

It makes me very sad to go south and see the huge numbers of roadkills on the side of the highway. Where I'm from, we try real hard to inflate the deer population, since the winters and the coydogs keep the population down so much that the hunting isn't real easy.

This problem is widespread in the urban areas of my rural, pro-firearms home state. They solved it by hiring sharpshooters to kill the deer with rifles at night within city limits. It worked really well and they gave a ton of meat to the food bank.

Which state is this? I'm surprised anyone would authorize hunting in an urban environment at all, given the risk of collateral damage. Just because you've shot the deer precisely doesn't guarantee the bullet isn't going to fully penetrate and keep on going.

http://helenair.com/news/local/sharpshooter-plan-on-target/a...

In New Zealand they consider the deer to be an invasive species and were actually shooting deer from helicopters.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helicopter-based_hunting_in_Fi...

Why not bring back the giant Moa from the dead and have them crowd out the deer?

Bringing back the Haast Eagle would perhaps be more entertaining.

I'd Kickstarter that.

I'm not entirely sure, but there appears to be some insight in this article: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2012/11/the-dee...

Fewer hunters, less land where hunting is permitted (small farms).

The hunting restrictions are basically why the deer population recovered to the absurd levels they have. They need some tuning the other way, maybe extend the season (eg, shorten the exclusive bow-hunting season and lengthen the regular hunting season).

If you're not allowing hunting on your property, it would also be good (albeit expensive) to fence it, so deer cannot easily move through, to reduce their available forage.

Wolves kept the deer population in check for eons before humans ever showed up. The real reason the deer population is out of control is because we've extirpated their natural predator. Unfortunately for the forest's sake, it will never be politically tenable to have wild wolves roaming the exurbs of New England.

Mentioned it above but I live in the northern Idaho region. We've grown our wolf population for awhile. Now we are at the point of having too many wolves that we are opening hunting to them.

Not at all. In Pennsylvania, hunters harvest over 300,000 deer per year. That's still not enough to control the population:

http://www.pgc.pa.gov/hunttrap/hunting/harvestdataandmaps/pa...

It's not a simple solution, because it's not very effective. In areas with limited open space, hunting is very much an exclusionary activity. In Staten Island, the NYC Parks Department is performing an experiment in deer sterilization: https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/22/nyregion/deer-vasectomies...

I do forget the NE is dense living around the northern Idaho region.

In NJ there's a restriction from hunting within 450 feet of a building. In Idaho that's probably laughable, but here it leaves a lot of space where you can't discharge any weapons.

There's a parallel with the charge that the "Drug Free School Zone" laws discriminate against minority communities because everywhere you go in cities, you're within 1000 feet of a school.

Deer can be quite the issue. There are a handful of cities in Utah (and I'm sure other places) who have opened up hunting to archers - within the city limits because the deer population is out of control.

Back to the tree side of the story - I'm in NW Montana where trees are like weeds. In the spring I could find 1-2 fir tree seedlings per square inch and sometimes 4-5 in an inch! Despite having quite a few deer, forests are thick. I should rent some sheep to keep down the "weeds" we call trees.

I always felt it was kinda unreal that a tiny plant barely larger then the surrounding grass can become a huge tree given enough time of poor lawn maintenance. It doesn't even seem to take very long until tree saplings gain the ability to do some damage to your lawn mower.

There's a similar problem in the Olympic National Forest, but this time with mountain goats.

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