1 How Wolves Change Rivers
2 One of the most exciting scientific findings of the past half century has been the discovery of
3 widespread trophic cascades
4 A trophic cascade is an ecological process which starts at the top of the food chain and tumbles
5 all the way down to the bottom
6 And the classic example is what happened in the Yellowstone National Park in the united states
7 when wolves were re-introduced in 1995 (nineteen ninety-five)
8 Now, we … we all know that wolves kill various species of animals but perhaps we’re slightly
9 less aware that they give life to many others
10 Before the wolves turned up, they’d been absent for 70 years – that the numbers of deer,
11 because there was nothing to hunt them, had built up and built up in the Yellowstone Park and
12 despite efforts by humans to control them, they’d managed to reduce much of the vegetation
13 there to almost nothing, they’d just grazed it away
14 But as soon as the wolves arrived even though they were few in number, they started to have
15 the most remarkable effects
16 First, of course, they killed some of the deer but that wasn’t the major thing, much more
17 significantly – they radically changed the behavior of the deer
18 The deer started avoiding certain parts of the park, the places where they could be trapped
19 most easily, particularly the valleys and the gorges, and immediately those places started to
20 regenerate
21 In some areas, the height of the trees quintupled in just six years
22 Bare valley sides quickly became forest of aspens and willows and cottonwood and as soon as
23 that happened, the birds started moving in
24 The number of songbirds and migratory birds started to increase greatly
25 The number of beavers started to increase because beavers like to eat the trees, and beavers,
26 like wolves, are ecosystem engineers, they create niches for other species
27 And the dams they built in the rivers, um, provided habitats for otters, and muskrats, and ducks
28 and fish and reptiles and amphibians
29 The wolves killed coyotes, and, as a result of that, the number of rabbits and mice began to rise,
30 which meant more hawks, more weasels, more foxes, more badgers
31 Ravens and bald eagles came down to feed on the carrion that the wolves had left
32 Bears fed in it, too, and their population began to rise, as well, partly, also, because there were
33 more berries growing on the regenerating shrubs
34 And the bears reinforced the impact of the wolves by killing some of the calves of the deer
35 But here’s where it gets really interesting
36 The wolves changed the behavior of the rivers
37 They began to meander less, there was less erosion, the channels narrowed and more pools
38 formed, more ripple sections, all of which was great for wildlife habitat
39 The rivers changed in response to the wolves and the reason was that the regenerating forest
40 stabilized the banks so that they collapsed less often, so that the rivers become more fixed in
41 their course
42 Similarly, by driving the deer out of some places and the vegetation recovering, on the valley
43 sides, there was less soil erosion because the vegetation stabilized that as well
44 So the wolves, small in number, transformed not just the ecosystem of the Yellowstone
45 National Park, this huge area of land, but also, its physical geography