Pleistocene Rewilding

[Eric]

I recently found an intriguing article on the internet. It involves the 'rewilding' of large stretches of the North American continent to it's conditions in the Pleistocene era (i.e: Ice Age, mammoths and such) by introducing modern descendants and relatives of the Pleistocene mammals. Asian or African elephants rather than mammoths, African lions and cheetahs rather than their extinct American relatives. And so on and so forth. This introduction of megafauna (large animals like elephants) to North America would help preserve existing fauna like bison and pronghorns, who evolved in response to the megafauna of the Pleistocene. Additionally, the introduction of these megafauna would fill ecological niches which have been vacant since the Pleistocene. Here's the article:

When paleontologists look at the North and South American large animal fauna of the late Pleistocene (50,000 to 10,000 years ago) and then compare it with that in Africa and Asia, something immediately leaps out: the Americas and Africa and Asia are comparable in the number of species weighing 100 pounds or more.

When mammologists and other zoologists look at today’s large animal fauna in North America and then compare it with those of Africa or Asia, something else immediately leaps out: North America is greatly lacking in the number of species weighing 100 pounds or more.

What gives? Why the precipitous decline in large critters in the Americas?

The most reasonable answer is that when behaviorally modern humans, who were skilled big-game hunters, spread to the New World about 13,000 years ago they disproportionately slaughtered big animals and drove many species into extinction in those parts of the world where big animals lacked experience with such a predator. Some of those big animals were classic keystone species having disproportionate effects on their ecosystems. Thus their loss precipitated a wave of secondary extinctions.

Of living kinds of horses, Prezwalski’s Horse, or the P. Horse, is the closest to the horse found in North America 13,000 years ago. Surviving P. Horses lived on the steppes of Asia, including the vast, wild plains of Mongolia. They nearly became extinct in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, but captive breeding has increased numbers to a couple of thousand. Many of these are in the United States with the largest single group on private ranch land on the high steppes of northeastern New Mexico, where this photo was taken. The Sangre de Cristo Range of the Rocky Mountains rises in the background. Tentative plans are being discussed to bring P. horses, bison, elk, pronghorn, and maybe llamas together on a private ecological research ranch in northeastern New Mexico to study the ecological interactions of this group of herbivores that have not been together for 13,000 years. Photo by Dave Foreman.

Prezwalski’s Horses don’t look like domestic or feral horses. They look like they should be hanging out with mammoths. Photo by Dave Foreman.

Given that the several thousand years since those extinctions are but an eye-blink in geological and ecological time, it stands to reason that the New World is still reeling from the draconian loss of big animals. Therefore, it becomes reasonable to at least ponder the possibility of carefully restoring appropriate big animals to North America from Asia and Africa to see if they have beneficial impacts on truncated ecosystems and to study whether such beasts, some of which are highly imperiled in their current homes, might find secure homes where their relatives once flourished.

One would also assume that the most visionary paleontologists and conservation biologists would have already figured this out.

Indeed, they have.

And we call it Pleistocene Rewilding.

After meeting at the Ladder Ranch in New Mexico, a group under the lead of Josh Donlan at Cornell University and including Paul Martin and Michael Soulé prepared two articles on Pleistocene Rewilding: a short one in Nature and a longer, more detailed one in the America Naturalist. Both are available as PDFs on this page, as are stunning displays of what Pleistocene Rewilding might look like by sculptor Sergio de la Rosa. Josh Donlan has also written popular articles on Pleistocene Rewilding in Slate, Grist, and Scientific American.

Think big, think long, think deep.

--Dave Foreman

You may find the website here: http://www.rewilding.org/pleistocene_rewilding.html

Opinions? It's an interesting thought and could be an interesting experiment in an area of the Great Plains for example. It'd be cool to see Grizzlies fighting Lions for territory =D Joking, of course, but this Rewilding thought is indeed intriguing.

[CtrlAltDe1337]

Good, now I don't have to go to Africa to hunt lions...



















In all seriousness, though, I doubt this will happen.

[Redem]

They have a hard time pushing the reintroduction of wolves, I don't see how they're going to pass this. Farmers have enough of a problem with the idea of wolves chomping on livestock, let alone lions.

[Richard]

I imagine the 12 people who think it's a good idea don't rely on the land in question for their livelihood. People have to farm that area, it wouldn't work to employ them all as park rangers or self-sufficient antelope hunters as the proponents of this idea might suggest.

[Ky Colonel (not of KFC)]

Personally I would love the idea. But wether or not the next door neighbors would is another question.

The local population would have to be moved out of the surrounding area. That would require the buying up of massive tracks of land. And I don't think the scientists themselves have that kind of money. Plus you would likely have those people that were unwilling to move.

You might create an international committee to help maintain and look after the area. They could move into the area and basically live among their work.

And once the preserve was up and running, tours could be given to help offset the costs. Plus every now and then you could let in groups of hunters to keep the population in check. At a price of course. It could be like Jurassic Park; sans all the gore, bad maintenance and big fences. And dinosaurs.

But the biggest problem again would be the funds and the neighbors.