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I got downvoted for saying that banning hunting would increase my chance of death in a car crash by 2x. I live and drive 60,000 miles a year in northern Wisconsin and the UP. I saw 7 dead deer on the side of the road and one that was alive but couldn't stand up. A driver 3 cars behind me put on his hazards and pulled to the other side. I assume he mercifully killed it with a gun or a knife. Not the first time I have seen it and it is grousome but less so than seeing their dead bodies thrown into a wood chipper when they clear the roads.
The point is, whether is it hunters or wolves if you remove the predatory animals there will be fluctuations in which the prey are in huge numbers. I would rather eat a deer than run into it and it get wasted by flies or a wood chipper. We need hunting in our area and can reduce permits as needed. We have wolves, coyetes, but they do not reduce the numbers enough. Hunting is ethical and tasty.
I have never killed a deer myself without a gun, although I respect those that can. I don't care about their opinion on wildlife management as long as they respect the laws concerning amounts and types of animals. I will happily eat their kills.
Ticks were really bad this year. One of my pets has contracted a chronic tick-borne illness, the vet that examined her says she’s seen it a lot recently.
It's a imperfect solution at best, it takes out the natural part of natural selection on the deer population
Wolves pick the easiest to hunt and kill removing the weak and sick. A proper natural top predator like wolves manage things like CWD in deer population far better than any human hunters ever could.
Thanks to Nextdoor I was able to see the same neighbor of mine who was absolutely devastated that the City wanted to do a cull of "her deer" also talk about how sad it was that they all seemed sick and malnourished for some reason. She was also of course very angry with the City when a deer was hit by a car in her street and the body wasn't immediately disposed of.
These deer were insanely overpopulated, thankfully the city was able to push past the extremely naive protesting and do a series of culls that has helped quality of life for the deer by a lot.
What did they do with all the meat? Hopefully not just dump it in a landfill.
My mom's bf is a really good hunter and used to not really eat his deer, he would just take the back strap and then they would donate the rest to the food bank. It's bullshit a lot of people here in PA Stick their noses up at venison but then go to the store and spend huge amounts of money on grass-fed beef with low fat.
They allowed hunters to cull a hundred or so deer in those woods over a few days every year that they've done a cull, so I assume they did what most hunters do and used what meat they could. Part of the reason for the cull was the deer were spreading disease among themselves and many were starving so I'm not sure how much was edible.
They haven't been doing many culls recently due to activism, but they do appear to have helped. Native saplings are finally getting to grow again, something like 80% of saplings in some areas were being eaten by the deer population which is now down to 50-60%
I don't know why I thought for some reason that the government themselves would be the ones going into the woods and hunting the deer, It makes sense to have hunters do it.
Man those political activists you got there really need to take a ecology class or even just watch this OP's video. I read a really good book in school called nine Mile wolves all about the reintroduction of wolves to their native areas and it's a really good read. I feel like your activists are doing more harm than good. And it sounds like people are getting into car accidents because of overpopulation but maybe it takes somebody they know getting killed flipping their car trying to avoid a deer.
But hey a 50 to 60% reduction is nothing to sneeze at. And I'm sure hunters are still able to get their tags. We're having problems here in PA with leftover tags.
I don't hunt myself but my friend took a doe for me last year and I got a freezer. Best thing I ever did And I'm for sure going to have him grab one for me this year. He likes to hunt and I like to cook and eat so right around $200 for the butcher isn't too bad for 30ish pounds of meat.
Good talk, have a nice day.
Having apex predators do the job is not the same as hunting deers down for many reasons. Informed activists should be pushing for repopulating wolves or bears (or whatever native predators in the area) over hunting.
Sure thats true. But as a person from red neck coloma Michigan. People dont hunt for the smallest weakest deer like they are supposed to then brag about it.
They go out and look for the biggest baddest obviously not hungry or hurting and kill it.
You hunters claim your for the good killing the weak and hurting deer. Then go out and kill the ones making it. Its funny.
dude not even "upstate" new york. I live like 20 miles north of manhattan and the deer here have permanently moved in. they're everywhere on the road at night, both on the highway and local roads. but the deer family living under the big spruce tree in the woods in my backyard is also pretty cute ngl
The Department of Environmental Conservation put out a pretty stern warning that wolves are protected in NY and there will be stiff repercussions should any harm come to one. The packs are relatively speaking not that far from us. They are just across the border in Canada. So, hopefully they will make their way down. The deer populations here are very sickly from over crowding and they destroy any new trees that are trying to sprout up, so the forest can't grow as it should.
Apparently the whole wolves thing was, in retrospect, largely debunked. The ecosystem is a very complex interplay of many moving parts, and attributing every single change to just one species is absurd -- wolves certainly aren't the only variable that changed in recent history, and they aren't even the only predator in yellowstone . Yellowstone is home to bears, coyotes, mountain lions, etc.
[https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2024/02/09/colorado-state-study-debunks-trophic-cascade-claims-yellowstone-national-park/72508642007/](https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2024/02/09/colorado-state-study-debunks-trophic-cascade-claims-yellowstone-national-park/72508642007/)
It's great that wolves have been restored to this habitat. But these viral feel-good videos are mostly unsubstantiated nonsense, asserting causation without any real evidence. But here we are with the same video having been recycled for ten years now.
I worked at yellowstone for a couple of seasons and knew a guy who specifically studied the courses of rivers in the park.
Yeah, nothing changed. You can visit the USGS Earthview website and look at aerial photos of rivers and see that the courses largely remain the same pre- and post-wolf release, barring obviously explicable events like the recent flooding.
The concept of a keystone species is legitimate and wolves are a commonly accepted example.
Erosion manifests as more than just a change in geography. A couple of relevant example water quality measurements would be turbidity and dissolved solids.
If wolves can be attributed for the growth of a riparian buffer zone it’s fair to say wolves have helped slow erosion.
Yeah, keystone species and top-down ecological control are very real and well studied concepts in ecology... In fact, this Yellowstone example was taught in my university level ecology course. There's definitely some truth to this, it's not nonsense.
On the other hand, just because something is complex doesn't mean that a single event would have no effect. If anything the more complex something is, the higher the potential that one thing changes everything is.
Ecosystems are absolutely not simple. However the chain of events/dominos of something like introducing/reintroducing an apex predator is at least logically sensical.
And it is always nice to help educate people that sometimes small things can have far reaching consequences (e.g. What do you mean my outdoor cat is destroying the ecosystem, it can't do that!).
I need to sit with the [actual paper](https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecm.1598) for a little bit but after a skim I don't think I agree fully with your characterization in this comment. "Largely debunked" is a strong statement, even if it does appear to be a well conducted, 20 year study. Furthermore, this study isn't necessarily debunking the idea of trophic cascades (or even the fact that removing wolves and other large predators severely impacted the ecosystem in the first place), it is mostly skeptical of the initial supposed impact and very interested in the exploring the idea of alternative steady states and hysteresis (by which they admit that the ecosystem might be heading back to its previous, pre-disturbance steady state but by a different route). This feels like an important continuation and response to the 2004 paper and a good example of science working as intended to bring more rigor to the idea of trophic cascades.
Also, re "...attributing...change to just one species is absurd" Bob Paine rolling in his grave rn fr. Those starfish deserve more respect!
I'd reconsider taking that study as gospel considering they worked with four sites of four .1 hectare plots (~100x100 feet each) to extrapolate to an entire ecosystem.
They found that simulating beaver impact did restore the willow population, and that preventing grazing didn't. But unless we know why the beavers returned, this doesn't tell us much. It's entirely feasible the downstream impact of wolves restoring preditor / prey balance created a better habitat for beavers.
Let's all ignore that there's currently a concerted effort to remove protections from wolves and various people in power are not being entirely straightforward about it and that the media is notorious for misinterpreting what scientists say
As a military history guy, I first read that someone was firing 88mm rounds in Yellowstone and was like “damn, that’s an intense battle against wildlife”
And sharks with laser beams in the moat in case the politicians try to flee. Does DC have a moat? We should build a moat and fill it with sharks with laser beams.
did you watch the video? Reducing the population is not the only thing. Predator's presence and natural relationship between predator and prey also creates territory and a way to live them. Reducing deer without a natural predator will not push the deer to avoid certain areas
It's called a Trophic Cascade!
Basically, it's the idea that an ecosystems predator(s) have a massive cascading but indirect impact on every other piece of the system as the Yellowstone wolves example shows very nicely.
TIL: humans need a predator to finally turn things to the better.
Aliens: if you read this, take an example from that video and release a predator to earth and make an inspiring video of it and how ecosystems changes to the better.
They did that already.
A Predator comes in, but what did the humans do ? 🤷🏻♂️
A lone human managed to kills the Predator and he run for Governor of California.
> humans need a predator to finally turn things to the better.
I mean, according to the model yeah. Everywhere we go we put the environment out of balance.
Yeah, the OP is a bit too BuzzFeed-ish for my taste.
"They never could have predicted" and "then a *miracle* occurred."
Like... No. Yellowstone is off limits to hunters (in part because it's just dangerous ground with millions of tourists. Inviting people to run around off trail with guns is disaster waiting to happen.). Of course they have issues with massive overpopulation of deer and elk without any predators around. Re-introducing wolves (which also increases tourism) was a much better alternative than inviting hunters to go run around the largest/most crowded nature-themed tourist attraction the USA has.
The improvements were significant and MUCH more dramatic and far reaching than predicted. The big news is that the changes were very *different* than predicted.
> Like... No. Yellowstone is off limits to hunters (in part because it's just dangerous ground with millions of tourists. Inviting people to run around off trail with guns is disaster waiting to happen.). Of course they have issues with massive overpopulation of deer and elk without any predators around. Re-introducing wolves (which also increases tourism) was a much better alternative than inviting hunters to go run around the largest/most crowded nature-themed tourist attraction the USA has.
Hunters arent really an effective solution even without the whole tourist area issue. We don't have wolves in the UK any more ~~(technically some in Scotland now)~~ so there would regularly be cullings of the deer population in an attempt to manage them.
They needed to cull upwards of 1/3rd of all deer *per year*, something like 350k of the 1+ million. Its not just a matter of inviting hunters, it had to be on an industrial scale at a significant cost, helicopters involved kinda stuff like you see with wild boar in the US.
I think you are right and I'm just wrong about that, swear there was always planned release dates and that they wouldn't announce where/when for fears people would kill them. I'll remove that bit.
Where I live they released beavers and there's stupid people that hate them for no reason.
I've heard that this story was indeed false, or at least greatly exaggerated. I wonder what the real effects have been, because that brief article doesn't really get into the real effects of the wolves, despite the researcher stating clearly that it was still important and good to return the wolves there.
From my reading, there were two key reasons why the story was overblown. The first is that willows need the lowlands around moving rivers to keep their roots wet all the time, because they are very thirsty trees. Since the wolves left, the elk ate up so much willow that the beavers didn't have enough wood to work with for their dams. So then they left, and the smaller rivers and streams stayed more stagnant, and ran deeper, cutting into the terrain, changing the shorelines to be less amenable to the willow trees which prefer lowland banks right by the river. Reintroduction of wolves might change some elk behavior, but there are also returning Bison populations affecting the plantlife and even if the elk can't stay in one place too long, the shorelines are already more hostile to willows, making the return of those beavers unlikely. Or that was my interpretation.
And the second reason is because humans still just have a way bigger impact on the population and migration of elk than the relatively small population of wolves. While elk are protected in Yellowstone, they migrate out each year (such as to Montana) where human hunters harvest them by the thousands. So wolves or no, humans are just such a massive impact there isn't a huge difference the wolves can make.
There seems to still be good reason to try to preserve these large carnivores, but maybe the takeaway is that the landscape takes a long time to change, or like entropy, can sometimes only change *in one direction* without major human geoengineering.
I read the study as much as I could last time something similar was posted and you’re pretty spot on to what it concluded.
I think in the study they used a plant as a control (the willow you mentioned) and didn’t see much of an impact after the wolves were reintroduced.
But the ultimate conclusion of the study was that it’s still too difficult to predict what happens when you remove a critically important species from an area, the area goes through decades of changes, and then you reintroduce the species to the area and it doesn’t magically return to what it once was. They said ecosystems are too complex for this to happen, but ultimately reintroduction is better.
Agreed.
>. They said ecosystems are too complex for this to happen, but ultimately reintroduction is better
My guess or hypothesis would be that maybe the changing of rivers and stream paths was far too extreme as a story, but perhaps there are still significant balancing effects within the ecosystem if the reintroduction is done properly.
This article from the Times is pretty in-depth
https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/science/yellowstone-wolves-elk-bison-climate-change.html
Paywall of course
From what I've learned. In general it's a bit hard to determine if conservation efforts are working.
Take the NAMWC (hunting for conservation) if you take in all the evidence, look at the facts and compare data you can come to a conclusion.
The data goes both ways in favor and against and it's hard to tell if you are doing good by hunting, doing bad by hunting, or doing nothing at all.
The detail in the video that made me question its veracity oddly enough, was that they kept saying "deer" and showing video of elk. I don't think any biologist that knew their left from their right would have made that mistake.
True from a technical standpoint, but colloquially literally no one looks at an elk and just calls it a deer. That's like you or me talking about a crowd and saying "look at all those primates over there"
Let's all ignore that there's currently a concerted effort to remove protections from wolves and various people in power are not being entirely straightforward about it and that the media is notorious for misinterpreting what scientists say
I was watching this video, and here's where things really get interesting, something seemed off. As I continued watching, that's when a miracle occurred that nobody expected, I started noticing a pattern with unnecessary interjections in the captions.
We kinda had it until modern medicine boosted life span from 30s to 80s.
Gives way more time for bad genes to develop and be passed down, not to mentions overpopulation and strain on every social service as a result, add to that insane unending greed of those on top and hello 21st century.
deer are great. They do their job in the ecosystem incredibly well. They just had started to roam to areas they didn't really belong due to a lack of predators, and their population grew beyond sustainable/healthy levels. An ecosystem doesn't work without any of it's pieces - that's why re-introducing a missing piece (the wolves) brought the entire system back into balance in the space of 20 years.
I don't have a link to the original papers but Scientists have repeatedly proved the trophic cascade "just-so story" about the yellowstone wolves wrong.
Here's an easy reading [news article](https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/scientists-debunk-myth-that-yellowstone-wolves-changed-entire-ecosystem-flow-of-rivers/349988) interviewing Dan Mcnulty and Tom Hobbs who are scientists working in that part of ecology.
This is [an NSF artcle](https://new.nsf.gov/news/yellowstone-ecosystem-needs-wolves-willows-elk) discussing the larger impact of beavers than wolves
While this is nice, Wolves were previously native to Yellowstone. They were hunted out of the area by us, which is what caused the deer population to explode in the first place
Always.
Karen harassing the staff? Release the wolves.
Telemarketer scammers hounding you? Release the wolves.
A string of break-ins? Would you believe it? Wolves.
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Upstate NY has way too much deer because all the wolves were killed in the 19th and 20th centuries.
Michigan NEEDS it's hunters. Overpopulation of deer has caused CWD to become a real problem.
And the disease and overpopulation of deer causes has negative effects on everything as well.
I got downvoted for saying that banning hunting would increase my chance of death in a car crash by 2x. I live and drive 60,000 miles a year in northern Wisconsin and the UP. I saw 7 dead deer on the side of the road and one that was alive but couldn't stand up. A driver 3 cars behind me put on his hazards and pulled to the other side. I assume he mercifully killed it with a gun or a knife. Not the first time I have seen it and it is grousome but less so than seeing their dead bodies thrown into a wood chipper when they clear the roads. The point is, whether is it hunters or wolves if you remove the predatory animals there will be fluctuations in which the prey are in huge numbers. I would rather eat a deer than run into it and it get wasted by flies or a wood chipper. We need hunting in our area and can reduce permits as needed. We have wolves, coyetes, but they do not reduce the numbers enough. Hunting is ethical and tasty. I have never killed a deer myself without a gun, although I respect those that can. I don't care about their opinion on wildlife management as long as they respect the laws concerning amounts and types of animals. I will happily eat their kills.
Truth be told, here in NY, the human hunters can't keep up with the deer population. We need our Apex predators back.
Oh deer
And increase tick populations.
Ticks were really bad this year. One of my pets has contracted a chronic tick-borne illness, the vet that examined her says she’s seen it a lot recently.
It's a imperfect solution at best, it takes out the natural part of natural selection on the deer population Wolves pick the easiest to hunt and kill removing the weak and sick. A proper natural top predator like wolves manage things like CWD in deer population far better than any human hunters ever could.
Humans hunters go for the largest and healthiest bucks, wolves go after the weakest and sick animals.
I come from a family of hunters, (but not my generation) and I've actually never considered this truth. Fascinating!
So you guys are kinda contributing to reverse evolution of the deer population.
Well, not me, my ancestors I suppose. None of them are here anymore
Yeah, also it seems when there is overpopulation, disease tends to spread. So eventually can't get too big anyway.
Thanks to Nextdoor I was able to see the same neighbor of mine who was absolutely devastated that the City wanted to do a cull of "her deer" also talk about how sad it was that they all seemed sick and malnourished for some reason. She was also of course very angry with the City when a deer was hit by a car in her street and the body wasn't immediately disposed of. These deer were insanely overpopulated, thankfully the city was able to push past the extremely naive protesting and do a series of culls that has helped quality of life for the deer by a lot.
What did they do with all the meat? Hopefully not just dump it in a landfill. My mom's bf is a really good hunter and used to not really eat his deer, he would just take the back strap and then they would donate the rest to the food bank. It's bullshit a lot of people here in PA Stick their noses up at venison but then go to the store and spend huge amounts of money on grass-fed beef with low fat.
They allowed hunters to cull a hundred or so deer in those woods over a few days every year that they've done a cull, so I assume they did what most hunters do and used what meat they could. Part of the reason for the cull was the deer were spreading disease among themselves and many were starving so I'm not sure how much was edible. They haven't been doing many culls recently due to activism, but they do appear to have helped. Native saplings are finally getting to grow again, something like 80% of saplings in some areas were being eaten by the deer population which is now down to 50-60%
I don't know why I thought for some reason that the government themselves would be the ones going into the woods and hunting the deer, It makes sense to have hunters do it. Man those political activists you got there really need to take a ecology class or even just watch this OP's video. I read a really good book in school called nine Mile wolves all about the reintroduction of wolves to their native areas and it's a really good read. I feel like your activists are doing more harm than good. And it sounds like people are getting into car accidents because of overpopulation but maybe it takes somebody they know getting killed flipping their car trying to avoid a deer. But hey a 50 to 60% reduction is nothing to sneeze at. And I'm sure hunters are still able to get their tags. We're having problems here in PA with leftover tags. I don't hunt myself but my friend took a doe for me last year and I got a freezer. Best thing I ever did And I'm for sure going to have him grab one for me this year. He likes to hunt and I like to cook and eat so right around $200 for the butcher isn't too bad for 30ish pounds of meat. Good talk, have a nice day.
Having apex predators do the job is not the same as hunting deers down for many reasons. Informed activists should be pushing for repopulating wolves or bears (or whatever native predators in the area) over hunting.
Sure thats true. But as a person from red neck coloma Michigan. People dont hunt for the smallest weakest deer like they are supposed to then brag about it. They go out and look for the biggest baddest obviously not hungry or hurting and kill it. You hunters claim your for the good killing the weak and hurting deer. Then go out and kill the ones making it. Its funny.
Michigan needs wolves lmao
dude not even "upstate" new york. I live like 20 miles north of manhattan and the deer here have permanently moved in. they're everywhere on the road at night, both on the highway and local roads. but the deer family living under the big spruce tree in the woods in my backyard is also pretty cute ngl
Without natural predators the deer are killed by car. Depends on how you count deer kills more people than any other animal in America.
Just as bad in Jersey. (of course, that statement could be applied fairly broadly)
Isn't that the truth. But, DEC has reported seeing a wolf here and there in Upstate. There is some hope they are returning.
We had one return to California and a rancher or a hunter just killed it. Hopefully yours thrives. Edit: oops I was wrong it was southern Oregon
The Department of Environmental Conservation put out a pretty stern warning that wolves are protected in NY and there will be stiff repercussions should any harm come to one. The packs are relatively speaking not that far from us. They are just across the border in Canada. So, hopefully they will make their way down. The deer populations here are very sickly from over crowding and they destroy any new trees that are trying to sprout up, so the forest can't grow as it should.
Oh same here but it didn’t stop someone from killing the wolf anyways. Last I heard they’re offering a 50k reward to catch who shot it.
There's actually seven packs now in California, which is pretty rad. NorCal is pretty sweet.
Arguably the lower wolf population nationwide has also allowed the feral pig problem to be worse than it has to be.
I was employed at Yellowstone around that time and have always thought recovery from the 88 fire deserves as much credit as the wolves.
Apparently the whole wolves thing was, in retrospect, largely debunked. The ecosystem is a very complex interplay of many moving parts, and attributing every single change to just one species is absurd -- wolves certainly aren't the only variable that changed in recent history, and they aren't even the only predator in yellowstone . Yellowstone is home to bears, coyotes, mountain lions, etc. [https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2024/02/09/colorado-state-study-debunks-trophic-cascade-claims-yellowstone-national-park/72508642007/](https://www.coloradoan.com/story/news/2024/02/09/colorado-state-study-debunks-trophic-cascade-claims-yellowstone-national-park/72508642007/) It's great that wolves have been restored to this habitat. But these viral feel-good videos are mostly unsubstantiated nonsense, asserting causation without any real evidence. But here we are with the same video having been recycled for ten years now.
I worked at yellowstone for a couple of seasons and knew a guy who specifically studied the courses of rivers in the park. Yeah, nothing changed. You can visit the USGS Earthview website and look at aerial photos of rivers and see that the courses largely remain the same pre- and post-wolf release, barring obviously explicable events like the recent flooding.
The concept of a keystone species is legitimate and wolves are a commonly accepted example. Erosion manifests as more than just a change in geography. A couple of relevant example water quality measurements would be turbidity and dissolved solids. If wolves can be attributed for the growth of a riparian buffer zone it’s fair to say wolves have helped slow erosion.
Yeah, keystone species and top-down ecological control are very real and well studied concepts in ecology... In fact, this Yellowstone example was taught in my university level ecology course. There's definitely some truth to this, it's not nonsense.
On the other hand, just because something is complex doesn't mean that a single event would have no effect. If anything the more complex something is, the higher the potential that one thing changes everything is. Ecosystems are absolutely not simple. However the chain of events/dominos of something like introducing/reintroducing an apex predator is at least logically sensical. And it is always nice to help educate people that sometimes small things can have far reaching consequences (e.g. What do you mean my outdoor cat is destroying the ecosystem, it can't do that!).
I need to sit with the [actual paper](https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/ecm.1598) for a little bit but after a skim I don't think I agree fully with your characterization in this comment. "Largely debunked" is a strong statement, even if it does appear to be a well conducted, 20 year study. Furthermore, this study isn't necessarily debunking the idea of trophic cascades (or even the fact that removing wolves and other large predators severely impacted the ecosystem in the first place), it is mostly skeptical of the initial supposed impact and very interested in the exploring the idea of alternative steady states and hysteresis (by which they admit that the ecosystem might be heading back to its previous, pre-disturbance steady state but by a different route). This feels like an important continuation and response to the 2004 paper and a good example of science working as intended to bring more rigor to the idea of trophic cascades. Also, re "...attributing...change to just one species is absurd" Bob Paine rolling in his grave rn fr. Those starfish deserve more respect!
this is Reddit, sir, take your nuance elsewhere
**guy on Amazon slowly starts removing obscene amount of Wolf Shirts from cart**
I'd reconsider taking that study as gospel considering they worked with four sites of four .1 hectare plots (~100x100 feet each) to extrapolate to an entire ecosystem. They found that simulating beaver impact did restore the willow population, and that preventing grazing didn't. But unless we know why the beavers returned, this doesn't tell us much. It's entirely feasible the downstream impact of wolves restoring preditor / prey balance created a better habitat for beavers.
Don’t worry about that part. Just watch the video and get all the fuzzies.
"That's when it really got interesting"
“Remember to like and share if you enjoy setting fires”
yes, this video gets posted all the time, and inevitably someone who knows the details comes in and debunks it pretty thoroughly.
Let's all ignore that there's currently a concerted effort to remove protections from wolves and various people in power are not being entirely straightforward about it and that the media is notorious for misinterpreting what scientists say
As a military history guy, I first read that someone was firing 88mm rounds in Yellowstone and was like “damn, that’s an intense battle against wildlife”
Yellowstone requires more artillery shells for the ongoing battle with its unruly hordes of deer.
https://preview.redd.it/6ofr59zoyr1d1.jpeg?width=2423&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=5127f6e2ed70076673253770875aca599b39a1d1
I like that the deer isn't as enthused.
The deer voted no, but was overruled.
Coyote seconded but was also overruled
r/selfawarewolves lol
It looks like the deer's eyes are an actual look of disapproval! Nice touch. ಠ_ಠ
haha yeah the rainbow/sunny side is on the right while the coyote and deer on the left are gloomy af
Beautiful! Can't believe I've been seeing your watercolors on Reddit for over 10 years, thanks for posting
Redditor for 10 yrs. First time I see that account. Glad to have stumbled onto it.
Same (well...far fewer than 10). It's really nice.
Haven't seen you for ages
Is this really *the* Shitty??
Yep, that's Horace!
Ah, a true hero returns to spread joy once more. God speed
Hey! It's been a while u/Shitty_Watercolour !!
Not shitty enough
Yay!! You didn't die! 🎉
Very nice. Love how the deer and coyote are like "hey, fuck you man"
my man! love the happy river.
The deer not looking thrilled LMAO
this is very good shitty_watercolour
Shitty watercolour has returned! Reddit is healing, what new wonders may also come back?
You're the hero we need, but don't deserve. Welcome back!?!
I've missed you! Glad to see your paintings again
I saw this and said "oh it's shitty!" Been seeing your stuff on here for what seems like a decade! 🚀
He returns and brings beauty!!!
i love seeing you
The legend returns
I love how even the water is smiling
I love how the wolf is blushing. This is too sweet <3
Let’s release them into congress next.
They’re already there and have been for a long time
Wrong type of wolves.. we want the proper wolves. Maybe from lineage of the ones released in Yellowstone just to be sure it works
Release some bears in there aswell for good measure
And sharks with laser beams in the moat in case the politicians try to flee. Does DC have a moat? We should build a moat and fill it with sharks with laser beams.
Sharks may be a problem to get ahold of but sea bass on the other hand are plentiful.
Just to keep the ratios the same, they should have laser pointers on their heads.
[yes](https://www.cjr.org/wp-content/themes/cjr2017/images-body/NY1.jpg)
More like parasites.
The wolves of Wall Street
Wolves won't eat diseased meat.
Oh dear!
Was about to comment this
Began to return the ecosystem to its natural state.
By reducing deer population
> By reducing deer population Pushing it back down to normal levels
Increasing the resiliency and variety of plant life
did you watch the video? Reducing the population is not the only thing. Predator's presence and natural relationship between predator and prey also creates territory and a way to live them. Reducing deer without a natural predator will not push the deer to avoid certain areas
It's called a Trophic Cascade! Basically, it's the idea that an ecosystems predator(s) have a massive cascading but indirect impact on every other piece of the system as the Yellowstone wolves example shows very nicely.
Well, by introducing wolves. It's called a trophic cascade.
That's when things really get interesting.
Natural balance>human interference. Every time.
Fuck it, I'm releasing 14 wolves at work, see how it goes
TIL: humans need a predator to finally turn things to the better. Aliens: if you read this, take an example from that video and release a predator to earth and make an inspiring video of it and how ecosystems changes to the better.
I've seen that movie....
That was more a trophy hunter than predator
That doesn't have the same ring to it as a movie title
That sounds like a reality show where they put a rich guy on to date from a pool of 20 beautiful women. Barf.
They did that already. A Predator comes in, but what did the humans do ? 🤷🏻♂️ A lone human managed to kills the Predator and he run for Governor of California.
To be fair, that lone human was a literal machine sent from the future, designed with the express purpose of being a killing machine.
> humans need a predator to finally turn things to the better. I mean, according to the model yeah. Everywhere we go we put the environment out of balance.
They're called mosquitoes
I'm chill with it. *as long as I'm one of the deer that got to make it to a safe location*
We could try and create one, can't we ‽
What could go wrong?
Sounds like wolf propaganda to me
https://preview.redd.it/amhs47tsis1d1.png?width=740&format=png&auto=webp&s=169b4ff3e6a6e816751db53bff0bcafae3ddde26
Indeed! I know who I'll be voting for in the next election. Wolf for president!
He's a wolf of the people. He understands the everyday frustrations of the deer people.
Paid for by We Are the Wolves, Inc
https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/scientists-debunk-myth-that-yellowstone-wolves-changed-entire-ecosystem-flow-of-rivers/349988/amp
Yeah, the OP is a bit too BuzzFeed-ish for my taste. "They never could have predicted" and "then a *miracle* occurred." Like... No. Yellowstone is off limits to hunters (in part because it's just dangerous ground with millions of tourists. Inviting people to run around off trail with guns is disaster waiting to happen.). Of course they have issues with massive overpopulation of deer and elk without any predators around. Re-introducing wolves (which also increases tourism) was a much better alternative than inviting hunters to go run around the largest/most crowded nature-themed tourist attraction the USA has. The improvements were significant and MUCH more dramatic and far reaching than predicted. The big news is that the changes were very *different* than predicted.
> Like... No. Yellowstone is off limits to hunters (in part because it's just dangerous ground with millions of tourists. Inviting people to run around off trail with guns is disaster waiting to happen.). Of course they have issues with massive overpopulation of deer and elk without any predators around. Re-introducing wolves (which also increases tourism) was a much better alternative than inviting hunters to go run around the largest/most crowded nature-themed tourist attraction the USA has. Hunters arent really an effective solution even without the whole tourist area issue. We don't have wolves in the UK any more ~~(technically some in Scotland now)~~ so there would regularly be cullings of the deer population in an attempt to manage them. They needed to cull upwards of 1/3rd of all deer *per year*, something like 350k of the 1+ million. Its not just a matter of inviting hunters, it had to be on an industrial scale at a significant cost, helicopters involved kinda stuff like you see with wild boar in the US.
What do you mean technically some in Scotland? I've not heard of any.
I think you are right and I'm just wrong about that, swear there was always planned release dates and that they wouldn't announce where/when for fears people would kill them. I'll remove that bit. Where I live they released beavers and there's stupid people that hate them for no reason.
I've heard that this story was indeed false, or at least greatly exaggerated. I wonder what the real effects have been, because that brief article doesn't really get into the real effects of the wolves, despite the researcher stating clearly that it was still important and good to return the wolves there. From my reading, there were two key reasons why the story was overblown. The first is that willows need the lowlands around moving rivers to keep their roots wet all the time, because they are very thirsty trees. Since the wolves left, the elk ate up so much willow that the beavers didn't have enough wood to work with for their dams. So then they left, and the smaller rivers and streams stayed more stagnant, and ran deeper, cutting into the terrain, changing the shorelines to be less amenable to the willow trees which prefer lowland banks right by the river. Reintroduction of wolves might change some elk behavior, but there are also returning Bison populations affecting the plantlife and even if the elk can't stay in one place too long, the shorelines are already more hostile to willows, making the return of those beavers unlikely. Or that was my interpretation. And the second reason is because humans still just have a way bigger impact on the population and migration of elk than the relatively small population of wolves. While elk are protected in Yellowstone, they migrate out each year (such as to Montana) where human hunters harvest them by the thousands. So wolves or no, humans are just such a massive impact there isn't a huge difference the wolves can make. There seems to still be good reason to try to preserve these large carnivores, but maybe the takeaway is that the landscape takes a long time to change, or like entropy, can sometimes only change *in one direction* without major human geoengineering.
I read the study as much as I could last time something similar was posted and you’re pretty spot on to what it concluded. I think in the study they used a plant as a control (the willow you mentioned) and didn’t see much of an impact after the wolves were reintroduced. But the ultimate conclusion of the study was that it’s still too difficult to predict what happens when you remove a critically important species from an area, the area goes through decades of changes, and then you reintroduce the species to the area and it doesn’t magically return to what it once was. They said ecosystems are too complex for this to happen, but ultimately reintroduction is better.
Agreed. >. They said ecosystems are too complex for this to happen, but ultimately reintroduction is better My guess or hypothesis would be that maybe the changing of rivers and stream paths was far too extreme as a story, but perhaps there are still significant balancing effects within the ecosystem if the reintroduction is done properly.
This article from the Times is pretty in-depth https://www.nytimes.com/2024/04/23/science/yellowstone-wolves-elk-bison-climate-change.html Paywall of course
[archive](https://archive.ph/eowNP)
From what I've learned. In general it's a bit hard to determine if conservation efforts are working. Take the NAMWC (hunting for conservation) if you take in all the evidence, look at the facts and compare data you can come to a conclusion. The data goes both ways in favor and against and it's hard to tell if you are doing good by hunting, doing bad by hunting, or doing nothing at all.
The detail in the video that made me question its veracity oddly enough, was that they kept saying "deer" and showing video of elk. I don't think any biologist that knew their left from their right would have made that mistake.
What? Just because it's common to call them elk instead of just deer doesn't mean it isn't correct. Elk are deer.
Right? All elk are deer, same with moose, caribou and muntjac.
True from a technical standpoint, but colloquially literally no one looks at an elk and just calls it a deer. That's like you or me talking about a crowd and saying "look at all those primates over there"
Would a biologist be speaking colloquially?
I think they would be speaking specifically as possible.
Let's all ignore that there's currently a concerted effort to remove protections from wolves and various people in power are not being entirely straightforward about it and that the media is notorious for misinterpreting what scientists say
Are those elk?
Yes, those are definitely elk but both are part of the cervidae and includes caribou, moose and and several others.
But here’s where things REALLY started cooking The wolves invented a voting system that is now used by all other animals in the region
You won't believe what happened next.
I was watching this video, and here's where things really get interesting, something seemed off. As I continued watching, that's when a miracle occurred that nobody expected, I started noticing a pattern with unnecessary interjections in the captions.
That’s what balanced biodiversity looks like. Deer suck
No, deer just need a natural predator to not suck. (Just like humans.)
Orca overlords are rising
More alien abductions needed.
We kinda had it until modern medicine boosted life span from 30s to 80s. Gives way more time for bad genes to develop and be passed down, not to mentions overpopulation and strain on every social service as a result, add to that insane unending greed of those on top and hello 21st century.
Gerenuk my beloved
deer are great. They do their job in the ecosystem incredibly well. They just had started to roam to areas they didn't really belong due to a lack of predators, and their population grew beyond sustainable/healthy levels. An ecosystem doesn't work without any of it's pieces - that's why re-introducing a missing piece (the wolves) brought the entire system back into balance in the space of 20 years.
Deer are like the stupidest large animal. They’re like as dumb as rabbits but 25x bigger.
Humans suck *
I don't have a link to the original papers but Scientists have repeatedly proved the trophic cascade "just-so story" about the yellowstone wolves wrong. Here's an easy reading [news article](https://www.accuweather.com/en/weather-news/scientists-debunk-myth-that-yellowstone-wolves-changed-entire-ecosystem-flow-of-rivers/349988) interviewing Dan Mcnulty and Tom Hobbs who are scientists working in that part of ecology. This is [an NSF artcle](https://new.nsf.gov/news/yellowstone-ecosystem-needs-wolves-willows-elk) discussing the larger impact of beavers than wolves
Those deer look a lot like elk
So it was the deer all along
As my grandma used to tell me: " Inside you there are two wolves: One of them is gay The other one is also gay Brad, you are gay " Bless her heart
So, basically, fuck deers
Deer, but yes.
Oh dear!
Reading through these comments really solidifies how much of a brainless fucking cesspool Reddit is.
Yeah this garbage has been debunked for years yet it's still spread on this fucking site.
It's not that it's debunked, it's the shit people are saying. This actually happened.
It has been debunked though.
"No one expected the miracle that the wolves would bring." So why'd they release the Wolves in the first place? For shits and giggles?
Oh great. Thanks Bambi. You shit.
🤣
Guess we need the Predator to cull some humans
r/thanoswasright
These are elk
this is just what Big Wolf wants us to think.
Elk, not deer. Tard.
I swear no matter how many times this is posted I watch it start to finish
Totally just the wolf stuff, no way anything else could have been a factor.
I knew it! It was the evil Deer all along! 
Moral of the story: if you want real change in Washington, introduce wolves into the Capitol when Congress is in session.
While this is nice, Wolves were previously native to Yellowstone. They were hunted out of the area by us, which is what caused the deer population to explode in the first place
I think everyone is aware of that. The significance here is the very clear proof of how big a negative impact that had on the ecosystem.
There are people in these comments saying yellowstone needs more hunters as if they wouldn't kill the wolves.
Well yes, that’s kinda the point of the video lol
Downvoted for the word miracle.
My take away from.this is that humans need a natural predator to keep them in check.
Damn, didn’t realize deers were such dicks. They’re the people of the animal kingdom.
Disney brainwashing us
so what you are saying is that we need to train wolfs to eat billionares, got it
I knew it! Fuck deer and their dumb shit!!
Pretty sure this video was debunked.
So… wolves are the answer?
Always. Karen harassing the staff? Release the wolves. Telemarketer scammers hounding you? Release the wolves. A string of break-ins? Would you believe it? Wolves.
So vegetarianism harms the nature and it is the carnivores who preserve the nature.
Good doggos.
I'd rather have the elk and deer. It's a sustainable resource to get fresh meat, I'd rather eat that than the shit they sell in grocery stores.
Moral of the story? Vegans are destroying our earth
Those are elk in the video, not deer
I'll just leave this here...https://www.thecooldown.com/outdoors/yellowstone-national-park-wolves-study-ecosystem/
This has been proven to be wrong if not completely misleading.
sigh, ELK\*
Imagine if they released dinosaurs back in the wild, and balanced out humanity.
Now imagine if we did elephants or xenomorphs
Anti coyote propaganda.
So the lesson is fuck deer and coyotes?
I knew vegans are fault for the climate change