Dear HCN,
I am
responding to Greg Hanscom’s editorial referring to the lofty ideal
that the mission for wildlife biologists is to work themselves out
of a job (HCN, 3/31/03: Dear Friends). It seems to me that wildlife
biologists are fair game for everyone. If we advocate some sort of
active management that the environmental community finds
objectionable, then those critics know better. If we advocate some
sort of management that impinges on users of the resources, then
they know better.
Now we have new terminology for an
age-old, ongoing discussion among professional wildlife biologists
as to the role of predation in regulating native ungulates such as
deer and elk. The editor and others have decided that “top-down”
regulation theory is a new concept, vis-a-vis “bottom-up”
regulation theory. And Yellowstone, after experiencing the wolf
again for less than a decade, is used as an example of how nature
should really work.
I am reminded that just after the
initial study of wolf-moose relationships was completed on Isle
Royale in the early 1970s, everyone was using it as an example of
the so-called balance of nature. Subsequently, the relationship has
fluctuated all over the place, and no one is crowing about any
balance of nature on that island.
There are examples where
predators have controlled their prey, and examples where they
haven’t, in what I like to call “real nature,” those areas where
human influence hasnÕt been all that pervasive. Sometimes
bottom-up works and sometimes top-down works. Sometimes, neither is
in play at the moment.
Perhaps the conclusion to be
derived, at this point, is that the predator-prey relationship is
really a predator-associated predator-prey-alternative
prey-pathogen-habitat-wildfire-plant pathogen-weather-climate
relationship that changes through space and time. It remains for
the wildlife biologist and other ecologists to continue to
investigate, document and attempt to understand the relationships
in all their complexity, and I hardly think we are going to work
ourselves out of a job in the process.
James M.
Peek
Viola, Idaho
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Beyond ‘predator-prey’.
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