@ethanblinck's essay on wolf reintroduction in Colorado just came out, and it's a great rumination on the limits of science in answering moral questions. I'd recommend that you read it even if I wasn't in it. 1/ hcn.org/issues/52.3/so…
Ethan spoke with me because I'm 1st author on a well-timed paper (linked below), but the paper was unusually collaborative. My coauthors (including @BryanMaitland, @adamthomasford, @BrettJesmer, and several others not on twitter) deserve a lot of credit sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
And if you want to understand the science of this stuff better, here's a partial list of papers that have shaped the way I think about trophic cascades in general and wolves in particular. There are lots of folks out there who have done fantastic work on this topic
First, @adamthomasford and my advisor Jake Goheen wrote a really compelling paper making the case that we should have higher standards for evidence of trophic cascades. It's extremely difficult and expensive, but well worth the effort sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Adam also walks the walk, as seen in this excellent paper on whether the recolonization of Laikipia County, Kenya by African wild dogs caused a trophic cascade esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.18…
Moving onto wolves, I think this paper by Mark Hebblewhite and others is strong and comprehensive evidence that wolves can drive trophic cascades, but shows how strongly humans can affect them esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.18…
In my personal favorite paper about Yellowstone's wolves, @wyokauffman and others show that maybe we need to pump the brakes on saying that just the fear of wolves can cause trophic cascades. We need stronger evidence esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.18…
This paper by @jeremyjcusack and others is also really strong evidence imo that fear of wolves doesn't automatically cause trophic cascades besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.11…
This paper by @micheltkohl and others may explain why: wolves gotta rest sometime, and elk can time their movements to coincide with periods when wolves aren't around as much. The landscape of fear that shapes prey behavior is dynamic esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.10…
Finally this paper out of the @RECaP_Lab shows another frequently missing link: it's really hard to study whole food webs, so we often study only parts of it, failing to reveal the whole picture sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Taken together, I think these papers show that while large carnivores can substantially impact biological communities, determining exactly how they do that is challenging. Their impacts are complex and diffuse.
I don't think anyone doubts that the reintroduction of large carnivores can substantially affect both herbivores and plants, or that wolves had some effect on Yellowstone's ecosystem.
But anyone who says they know exactly what will happen if and when wolves are reintroduced into Colorado isn't using the best available science.
I'm personally all for wolf reintroduction in Colorado. But like Ethan writes in his essay, that's a moral judgement, not a scientific one.
