Yellowstone National Park
Island Biogeography, Yellowstone and Avoiding the Next Mass Extinction?
Most of the national parks were established to preserve geological features. A few parks, such as Sequoia and Redwood, were established for biological reasons. Increasingly, however, national parks are visited, used, preserved, and managed for biodiversity. Humans continue to spread. More and more land is brought under cultivation. More of the produce of the sea is netted and served to humans.
A 2023 study showed how grossly humans now dominate, finding that the world has just 20 million tons of wild land mammals (white-tailed deer, elephants…) and 40 million tons of wild marine mammals (whales…), compared to 390 million tons of humans and 630 million tons of domestic livestock (cows, pigs…). That makes 60 tons of wild mammals but 1020 tons of domestic mammals, 17 times more!
As we will discuss below, extinction is more likely for smaller populations, and with over 6000 species of wild mammals, the populations of most of those species are quite small and thus prone to extinction. Different mammals have different requirements for food, water, and other resources, but the differences are not huge because we are all closely related mammals, so this 17-fold difference in domestic versus wild mammals translates into a huge difference in the share of the world’s resources used, with humans increasingly overwhelming nature.
Greenspoon, Lior, Eyal Krieger, Ron Sender, Yuval Rosenberg, Yinon M. Bar-On, Uri Moran, Tomer Antman et al. "The global biomass of wild mammals." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 120, no. 10 (2023): e2204892120.
Let's take a trip through Yellowstone, the Premiere Park
We briefly visited Yellowstone in Module 1, as the world’s first national park, and we went back to Yellowstone in Module 2 to discuss earthquakes. Yellowstone was indeed established to protect the geologic features, which were so rich, varied, and unusual that the early explorers found them hard to believe. The geysers, mud pots, hot springs, canyons, waterfalls, petrified trees, inside-out caves, and so much more cause many of us to believe that this is still the world’s best national park. But, if you chat with the rangers or with visitors, you will immediately recognize that people are deeply committed to the wildlife of Yellowstone. A ranger at any entrance station or a visitor’s center will spend the day fielding questions along the lines of “Where are the bears? Where are the wolves? Where are the moose? Where are the…?”
According to the National Park Service, Yellowstone hosts nearly 300 species of birds, 16 species of fish, five species of amphibians, six species of reptiles, and 67 species of mammals—including seven native ungulate species (elk, mule deer, bison, moose, bighorn sheep, pronghorn, and white-tailed deer; mountain goats are not originally native to Yellowstone but now occur in the north side of the park as well) and two bear species (black and grizzly). Badgers and bobcats, lynx and otters, and so many more species are found in the park. Along the Hayden Valley in the center of the park, or in the Lamar Valley to the northeast, or really almost anywhere in the park, a visitor who takes a little time to slow down, and especially one who goes out early morning and late evening, is almost guaranteed to have wonderful views of wildlife.
Yellowstone played an important role in saving the bison, which were hunted almost to extinction. In 1894, US soldiers arrested a poacher named Edgar Howell, and a photograph of the damage he had done proved to be essential in motivating Congress to pass additional protections for Yellowstone and the wildlife there. Full implementation of that act was some time in coming, and the population of bison in Yellowstone dropped to perhaps 23 animals or so, but, they survived, and Yellowstone is the only place in the lower-48 states that has had free-ranging bison since prehistoric times, with a modern herd that fluctuates a good bit but is generally around 5000 animals.
For more on the background of the picture, see Hampton, H.D., 1971, How the US Cavalry Saved Our National Parks, Chapter 7, Indiana University Press.
