2,200,000 acres, with 100 wolves.
Then they've made the claim that those 100 wolves in 2.2million acres has resulted in plants and fish returning? As opposed to their efforts doing nothing at all?
That said, I believe wolves had a profound effect on the Yellowstone ecosystem, particularly on elk and deer populations. Before their reintroduction, those species had few natural predators beyond hunters, vehicles, bears, and the occasional mountain lion. The imbalance led to overgrazing and the spread of diseases like Chronic Wasting Disease (CWD) in elk.
They've studied it and came to these conclusions, yes. Have you studied it and come to different conclusions?
Without engaging with the rest of your comment, and even assuming that wolves are distributed evenly (of course they are not, and some parts of the park are not suitable for wolves):
This equates to 1 wolf per chunk of land measuring about 6 miles square, so about 15% smaller than the city of San Francisco (which is a small city).
Wolves are territorial and they move through forest quite well. A ~35 square mile territory wouldn't be out of the question.
Edit: Notes from elsewhere:
> Wolf packs in Minnesota, for example, can have territories that range from 7.5 mi2 to >214 mi2 — a 28 fold difference in territory size
> Average territory size in northwestern Montana was 220 square kilometers (185 square miles) but was highly variable (USFWS et al. 2002). Average territory size for Yellowstone Gray Wolves was larger, averaging 891 square kilometers (344 square miles) (USFWS et al. 2002).
> Pack size is highly variable due to the birth of pups, but is typically between 4 to 8 wolves. Territory sizes range from 25 to 150 square miles; neighboring packs can share common borders, but territories rarely overlap by more than a mile.
Territory sizes range from 25 to 150 square miles
That is 15,000 to 100,000 acres per half-dozen wolves in the GP's units.
The effect on quaking aspens in Pardo is also something we need to study long term. Are the two related?
This is like triage, and concern trolling the 40 or 50 year side effects of triage treatment when someone is bleeding out is negligent bordering on criminal and treasonous imo
After all, off in a democracy an expert expects to be paid by taxpayers to make decisions that affect the taxpayer the expert should be, at the very least, be able to explain himself in an intelligible manner.
Thats the bare minimum of expectations. I also expect the taxpayer funded expert to provided full access to his data, notes and analysis software.
Im considered an expert in thermodynamics, materials science and E&M. The people that pay me routinely don't understand what I'm working on, but they expect me to explain myself.
But the experts did explain themselves. They’ve published numerous studies on how small wolf populations impact the larger ecosystem.
It’s not even that hard to understand. Yes Yellowstone is large, but there are a finite number of elk herds and the wolves move to follow and prey upon the elk herds.
Wolf packs can kill 20 elk per year per wolf, there are 120 wolves inside the park and 500 immediately around the park wandering inside it and killing elk that wander outside.
At the peak there were 18k elk in the park and now the numbers are down to 2000. There’s plenty of evidence that the decline is a direct result of the wolves.
Controlling elk population has tons of 2nd and 3rd order effects which have also been well documented.
Many downvoted comments etc. ( and much thanks for explaining the population numbers!)
The beauty of HN is that when someone doesnt know, or is wrong, we don't assume bad intent, but explain with good intentions at heart.
It's literally in the rules
I’ll say that I’ve not read the article so if it’s in the article then I would rather you just point to that, rather than make this response.
The reintroduction of wolves is associated with an immediate, steady, and durable decline in elk - i.e. pushed the ecosystem past an inflection point into a new equilibrium.
It’s an interesting question and this could be empirically tested if human hunting would be slowly reduced.
Without risk of harm, elk and deer linger near water. This tramples the shoreline. And they love eating noshing on (aspen) saplings. Over time, the shorelines become barren.
With the reintroduction of wolves, shorelines are no longer safe havens. Aspens have returned. With aspens, song birds have returned. Trees shade the water (eg streams), so fish are happier. Trees stabilize the top soil, reducing erosion, allows other plants to become reestablished.
I dimly recall beavers returned too.
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Aha. I was mostly right (or hallucinating). Here's perplexity link for "impact of return of wolves to yellowstone".
https://www.perplexity.ai/search/impact-of-return-of-wolves-...
I learned about the birds returning because of the wolves while volunteering at Audubon. That linked summary doesn't go into those details.
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Update: I should've read the OC first. My bad. TIL: (too many) bison also negatively impact riverbanks. I had thought (misremembered) that overall impact of bison was positive. Does Yellowstone need more cougars?
16,000 elk do quiet a lot, especially as they aren’t spending nearly as much time along river banks. Which changes what plants are in and around steams and thus what’s happening in and around those streams.