Earth to Wolf: Please Mess With Texas, Michigan, Wyoming...etc.

by Larry O'Hanlon | November 03, 2009

Here's a guest post from master science writer, eclectic veterinarian and my good friend Cynthia Mills:

On safari in Botswana, miles away from cities, towns, even villages, I looked out over the grassy savanna and saw… litter. Everywhere I looked there were white things, marring the pristine grasslands. On first glance it all looked like the Styrofoam clam shells reminiscent of fast food living.

Upon closer inspection I found out that I was both wrong and right. The gleaming white flotsam wasn’t Styrofoam, but it was litter—I was seeing the bones of the fast—well, speedy anyway—food of Africa, gazelles and impala.

This was all brought to mind by the publishing of a recent paper in Ecology. Researchers Bump, Vucevitch

and Peterson looked at wolf-kill sites in Isle Royale Park in Michigan and Yellowstone Park where wolves had dispatched moose and elk. What they found implicated the predators in an environmentally good thing: nutrient cycling. In short: the sloppy ways of wolves are good for the environment.

Nutrient cycling is the ecologists term for the returning of essential things like nitrogen, phosphorous and potassium to the soil, making it available for micro-organisms and plants. These minerals are essential to all forms of life. It is not as simple as just putting the stuff back—it is also important that the minerals be modified—added to carbon molecules for example—so that plants and animals can use them.

The researchers measured the levels of these elements in the soils of sites where wolves had made a kill. What they found was impressive: in sites where wolves had eaten a moose or an elk, there was as much as six times as much of these elements in comparison with other sites where no such noshing had occurred.

It didn’t stop there. Having these elements available in the soil is fine, but it will stay there unless you get some intermediates—that is, bacteria and fungi—capable of turning the elements into molecules that make the elements digestible to plants. So the researchers also looked for the presence of these life forms and found that indeed, there was evidence of increased growth, by more than a third.

Finally, they measured the plants themselves that had grown over these sites. There they found the plants were more nutritious as a result of all this littering. In a way the wolves were ensuring that the moose and elk they depended on would stay healthy, and, by extension, the entire ecosystem.

I’m not entirely sure how to take this. I’ve been trained all my life to clean up after myself and I expect everyone else to, as well. But maybe my idea of the pristine should extend to include the benevolent trashing of the predator.

Comments

[poikiloblastic]

It's not a suprise that there's more fungi/bacteria where there's dead animals, right? An animal that dies on its own is as likely to undergo bioremediation as one killed by predators.