Is there a way to follow this without opening a terrible Zuck owned website.
They forgot to ask the elk
I like the concise text information, but as a graphic designer this infographic is very poorly laid out and very easily causes confusion (as partially seen in the comments here).
Don’t dead open inside.
The genuinely toxic tale is that we sat around for 69 years before we decided to fix things.
Are we about through with the 69 years sitting around about climate change? Can we actually start fixing things?
How much of that was seeing what all those decades actually DID, and a generation later realizing it needed to be changed.
Still it’s crappy we are so crappy with our home. I do think we should work exceptionally hard to fix things here. Find real solutions to problems. Else what’s the point of going to other planets? We need those same skills to survive, terraform, geoengineer, know the potential for ecology, etc.
Most people like to argue that “people didn’t know better back then.” That’s absolute bullshit. There were ecologists and scientists fighting to preserve wolves in the 1920s, and conservatives and capitalists chose to ignore the best advice of educated experts because killing wolves was easier and more profitable.
Well I for sure learned in school that our ancestors called wolves the nurses of the forest. In our culture anyway. They’re very important because by hunting old and sickly animals preferentially instead of killing indiscriminately, they improve the overall health of populations of other animals like deer or elk. Obviously it’s also not great for any population to get too large because they’ll destroy their own food supply. Again, release the wolves.
Fascinating, even if a gruesome thought if you reverse the analogy.
The system is geared towards negative presumption of the recent past even as it glorifies and reveres the long past (ancient philosophers and religious figures).
Just in case most of us figure out that anything we think of as new or intractable problems are things that we knew about and were deliberately ignored or actively campaigned against by the same forces that do it now.
For the sake of argument, even if they didn’t know any better (shame on them for not knowing better), they could’ve easily recognized the problem and fixed it much sooner than 1995.
Sure, but we still have conservatives and capitalists ignoring the best advice of educated experts because it’s easier and more profitable.
PETA is still against it. Adding to the evidence that PETA is not a serious organization.
PETA are POS that needs to be put down like the rabid dogs they are.
How did wolves affect all of this?
My understanding is that this has been wildly oversimplified and puts much more emphasis on the Wolf conservation efforts. To be fair, there is also a lot of places in and around Yellowstone that still teach this same trophic cascade idea.
https://wolf.org/wolf-info/wolf-magazine/do-wolves-really-change-rivers-part-two/
without the wolves, there is nothing stopping the deer population/elks from exploding, and when theres a ton of deer or elk theres an increase the trees, bushes being stripped for food since deers like to eat them. Also the drastic increase in parasites that would affect other animals the deers, have like ticks and tickborne diseases.
trees and bushes die from all thier leaves getting stripped constantly, unless its a super poisonous tree(which is more common in the tropics), and birds dont have nests, and insects wont able to pollinate certain plants,etc.
Trophic Cascade would be a cool band namr
It’s the second box
How is it the wolves’ faults that elk are assholes?
It’s not, the lack of wolves caused the elk to become a problem. Returning the wolves is (according to the infographic) fixing the elk problems.
So it’s more like the wolves are policing the elk, it’s the wolves “fault” that the elk are not a problem.
The wolves were supposed to be the bouncers at the hip new club “Yellow Stone” and they were shirking their duties and started working at a different club called “The Underworld.” Because they weren’t there to stop those horny bastards, they fucked all those trees. It’s called wood for a reason, amirite? /s
2065: the entire population of Montana is wolves.
spoiler
Don’t ask about Idaho or Wyoming.
We’re reintroducing wolves in my state now and its been problematic so far.
https://coloradosun.com/2025/03/05/gray-wolves-depredation-payments-colorado-wildlife-commission/
Nb: I don’t have a side in this. Just sharing recent news.
The environment is more important than rancher’s bottom lines
1000%
https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1002/ecm.1598 more on this topic, it is open access
I wonder if anyone knows whether ranchers in WY / MT lost income & were compensated by the state as well?
Yes, they were. The Wyoming Game and Fish Commission regularly compensates losses due to predation that have been verified.
Reintroducing wolves won’t work everywhere.
Hunting can be an effective population control as well, but seeing how large and sparsely populated Yellowstone is, it’s probably why it didn’t work there.
I guess the government pays for all other lost income due to natural events?
Is 31 wolves enough for genetic diversity?
There are national forests next to it and native reservations nearby and a more difficult path to Canada, so you would expect some of the males to roam out. That’s only really a problem if they’re isolated.
