like … entire ECOSYSTEMS sometimes follow a boom/crash cycle where the prey species reproduce like mad and predators flourish in response until the plant food supplies are overconsumed and everybody fucking starves for a couple years and then the prey populations start growing in response to abundant foodstuffs and it happens all over again?
this winter featured what’s called an “irruption” of many migratory songbird species, in which they expand vastly beyond their normal territory in search of food, because last summer was a boom year (the pandemic interfered with pest control which led to more insects, which meant insect-eating birds had more food and thus raised more broods of offspring successfully, and then the winter weather fucked with their normal food supply so they had to travel further in search of food so birdwatchers across country found birds they’d never seen before queuing up at their feeders); this is common enough that there’s a word for it
pioneer farmers in 1800′s North America were repeatedly devastated by hordes of grasshoppers which swarmed across the Midwest eating everything green in sight, yes, exactly as described in the Little House books, and they were a persistent menace until coordinated human effort led to the extinction of that species of grasshopper
many parts of the country are dealing with incursions of feral hogs, which reproduce quickly, wreck crops, and present a danger to humans
ANYTHING pretty much will expand beyond the range of its ecological niche given the opportunity to do so, by which I mean abundant food, need-fulfilling habitat, and a comparative lack of predation pressure, although admittedly some species would take some specialized efforts to build them a habitat where they can outcompete everything to the point of fucking it up for everything else in that habitat
any invasive species is basically the result of this having happened by itself, usually with the species in question being completely unobjectionable in its original habitat, but disastrously overpowered in its new one. and then there’s places where the ecosystem as a whole just sort of rolls with it because there’s multiple species all with no off switch and they keep each other in line but if one escapes to where the others aren’t you might have a problem
humans are just really adaptive creatures with opposable thumbs and the ability to plot out absurdities like “what if we piped an entire river down the coast a few hundred miles” and “let’s make ourselves new skins for when our existing skin doesn’t do the job well enough” and a habit of moving to where the environment wasn’t expecting that
jacobvanloon
2087
tangentwithtanner
areudirty
janainaart
romaincrisis
origamiaround
titsay
