How it started:
How it's going:
@systlin made the mistake of adding a couple of quick lines about overpopulation in the King's Landing Kingswood to A Crossing of Fires and then I compounded the issue by doing maths about it and now the entire rest of the fic has been derailed
THERE ARE TOO MANY FUCKING DEER
@jarl-deathwolf this is based on calculations of the size of the Kingswood based on the official maps, and on the fact that it is a temperate rainforest, along with canonical info from the books is it is a private royal preserve where only the king or people he grants permission can legally hunt. We just plugged in deer population increase data based on irl studies of deer population increase in areas denuded of most natural predators and with little in the way of annual hunting cull.
It's all accurate
the fact that this is a legitimate extrapolation of the facts from canon is seriously the funniest part
There hasn't been a severe winter to kill them off in at least twenty years. There has been summer for TEN YEARS.
I hope everyone likes venison because it's about to flow like water.
i chime in with a haven't you people ever heard of
culling the goddamn deer
No, it's much better to leave these kinds of things
Until they've done growth exponentially
...okay but surely, SURELY, at some point on the journey to 8 million deer the bottleneck shifts from 'winter' to 'starvation'. What is the vegetation mass needed to support a deer? How fast are the trees dying as the deer flay off their bark? Is ground cover lasting long enough to fruit and drop seeds, are meadows able to form around the morticulture or are the grasses getting devoured as shoots, etc etc. (Heck, how does all that deer poop and the uneaten carcasses affect soil fertility! Maybe that makes up for some of the massive overgrazing?)
These are things that keep me up at night, yes
However
Given that a) westerosi ecology is presumably adapted to the absolutely bullshit seasonality, and b) any area that size (possibly as much as THREE! THREE! times the size of motherfucking Scotland) is going to experience heterogeneous population densities, and therefore bits will occasionally have lower grazing pressure, c) there's not 'no new growth' because nothing's growing but because it's all getting eaten and finally d) the Kingswood soil is the kind of incredibly rich you would expect from a temperate rainforest,,,,, it is possible that you could get that many fucking deer-and-associated hanging out in there eating anything and everything that dares grow a leaf below browsing height. Not necessarily likely, I'll grant you, but frankly no less likely than anything else in westeros right now.
The main limits on primary productivity - vegetative growth - are a) light and b) water with c) warmth coming in a somewhat more distant third
The stormlands has all three of those in spades, so it can grow things at approximately the speed of light. I really cannot overstate how much greenery somewhere like that can generate, it's just that normally it'll hit maximum resource use and slow down as things start overshading each other and shit. In an environment where any new growth gets immediately eaten and then shat out as high volumes of - essentially - compost??? Yeah. So much.
While I suspect any ground plants that need to set seed to survive are in shorter supply, there are always seeds and whatnot coming on from outside Outliers Forest, and - as any gardener will tell you, at length and at high volume - there are always pioneer species (weeds) that seem to fuckin SPAWN whenever there's a clear patch of earth left unattended for more than about five seconds. The Kingswood seedbank might be beginning to run low, but ~gestures helplessly~ they can apparently happily reseed after a fuckin MULTI YEAR WINTER so I would not be taking any bets there 🙃
(what this seemingly inexhaustible supply of large herbivores is doing to the *rest* of westeros's ecology is another, differently horrifying thought experiment, although it does explain how Nymeria can collect a wolfpack ostensibly nearing or exceeding 100 without them just obliterating the Riverlands' ecology, since presumably there's basically infinite deer emigrating North from the Kingswood. There must be. So many predators outside the Kingswood. (None of this makes any sense, we're trying to apply logic and science to a world invented by someone who fundamentally Does Not Understand ecology or SCALE! A royal hunting reserve THE SIZE OF A COUNTRY?!?!) I'm amazed the wolves only became a problem once Nymeria got involved! Fuck knows what the VALE is doing, with their ludicrous geographic border defence. Westerosi ecology is just. Such Bullshit)
Deer tend not to debark old trees - it's too tough and dry for their needs/tastes - so any of the young trees they can debark have already been debarked, which is one of the reasons Garrit is going so feral: between the immediate consumption of new seedlings and the death of any existing saplings below a certain age, there's possibly upwards of a fifty year gap in tree age. Which is, as almost any forester will tell you, an absolute fucking disaster, even when you're not part of a society that depends on wood for everything from fuel to building supplies to shoemaking
The Kingswood foresters have been staring down absolute disaster as it barrels at them at full speed, fully aware that they or their descendants are going to be blamed for it when someone in power actually deigns to notice it, because never in history has 'we tried to tell you but you ignored us!' worked as an explanation on nobles like Tywin Fucking Lannister.
Forget the Seven, Garrit and co now worship Those Three What Fucking Believed Us from now until the heat death of the universe
That's not to say it's a completely healthy population, by the way! As a couple of people have recognised in the notes (and as I have spent an exhausting amount of time explaining to people who think my ecology masters is a tool of Big Carnivore) predation is one of the primary ways a population stays healthy, since they preferentially pick off the weak and sick.
The Kingswood Assorted Large Herbivores (and boar) population is not as healthy as it could be, but also (in the spirit of both yes-and-ing AND trying to not actively contradict canon, which from what I recall suggests a perfectly healthy deer population) is spread over a large enough area (I know I keep harping on about it but I cannot get over how ludicrously huge it is! It's arguably bigger than Greece and Iceland COMBINED! Possibly as much - or maybe even more than, scale estimation is not an exact science - as 89,000 square miles!! Bigger than Minnesota! TWICE THE SIZE of Ohio! It's HUGE! there are smaller landmasses!!!) and also is not completely extirpated of wolves - there are probably more wolves in the Kingswood than even the foresters realise, it's just that once you reach a certain prey population size, predation is Not going to have an appreciable effect at predator densities low enough to stay under the radar - and (especially given that we collectively made the executive choice that CWD is not a thing because we're already dealing with ice zombies, let's not add prions to that horrorshow) with a sufficiently robust scavenger population (the fox population in the Kingswood must be OFF THE FUCKING CHARTS. you know what you get when you extirpate all the big predators from an area? Mesopredator bonanza) (I simply choose to assume GRRM just FORGOT TO MENTION the massive population of vulture analogues (buzzards, maybe? We know there's a bunch of carrion crows)) to keep the place from just ending up knee deep in naturally produced corpses... We can argue for an at least plausibly apparently healthy population
Hmm...The forest situation might be worse than imagined above, simply because the plants on the ground (and the leaf litter layer, which tbh would probably get eaten up too once the animals started legitimately starving?) are holding the soil in place, and in an area with high precipitation, it's going to erode catastrophically, probably to the point of killing trees as they become unstable and storms take them down. Rivers downstream would have changes to their banks from the sheer amount of sediment deposition.
Is this Game of Thrones universe? Don't they have multi year long winters? I feel like the most plausible way for that to work is if the deer become carnivorous.
This has sent me down a *checks clock* four hour (so far) research rabbithole because you make an intriguing point. While I don't have any definitive answers, I do now have a whole new bunch of questions to investigate and a lot of papers open in Firefox. So far I have several theories and a new interest in digestibility indexing science. Will check back in in a bit
I mean. Cows are definitely straight up herbivores and they will 100% chow down on a snake if they get the chance. So will horses. So I don't see why the deer couldn't be more omnivorous.
Deer are known to eat meat. Deer are known to eat other deer if they run across a dead one.
