Anyone Here Read "Where The Wild Things Were"? Fantastic Book On Trophic Cascade

[hatrack]

One chapter deals with the effects of the building of the Raul Leoni Dam in Venezuela. Because of the mountainous terrain, the rising water levels left a series of islands, ranging from small to very, very small, but with canopy, animals and plants intact.

The question biologist John Terborg asked was "Now what happens?"

Here's an excerpt from description of studies of the lake (Lago Guri) and its islands:

Guri's lack of living space had simplified the surveyors' task. Three quarters of the animal species found on the mainland were already missing form the islands by the time the crews arrived, most of them short-lived creatures unable to maintain themselves in such limited confines. As the islands got smaller, the casts naturally got shorter. What remained were skeleton crews of creatures surviving, in some cases, to numerical extremes.

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But among the primates, it was Alouatta seniculus, the red howler monkey, that came to most personally symbolize the depravity of Guri's bottom-heavy world. The Guri researchers would step ont an island the size of a suburban lawn, peer up, and see five howler monkeys staring down from a naked tree. Those five amounted to twenty or thirty times the typical densities on the mainland. But in order to appreciate the strangeness of that arrangement, it helps to first consider the brief textbook resume of a mainland howler monkey. Alouatta seniculus is one of a suite of six species of howler monkeys found throughout New World tropical forests from southern Mexico to northern Argentina. Prehensile-tailed primates typically living in bands of three to seven related individuals, howler monkeys are led by a large male, a husky , throaty monkey whose territorial roars can travel three miles through the jungle, letting neighboring troops of howlers know to stay away, and otherwise giving neophyte tourists the u unnerving impression of lions in their midst.

The howler monkeys of Guri had been put under intensive watch by Terborgh's researcher Gabriela Orihuela. Nothing Orihuela had ever seen or heard of monkey society on the mainland could prepare her for the sights awaiting of Lago Guri's littlest islands. Free of fearsome predators - and hounded by hunger - the howlers of Lago Guri no longer lived in coherent groups but instead they slept in separate trees. For lack of contact, they seldom groomed. Those that did come together sometimes fought, inflicting savage wounds. Their babies never played. The monkeys of Guri grew thin. There were ominous signs of infanticide. The howler monkeys of Lago Guri no longer howled.

The commonly held and unscientific impression among Orihuela and the rest of the Guri crew was that the howlers of Guri simply didn't like each other anymore. In this supposed paradise free of predators, the group-hugging howler monkey had been sentenced to a solitary confinement in hell. Even the favorite trees of the Guri howlers began biting back. Denuded by the relentless browsing, the trees started sending forth leaves increasingly spiked with bitter, nauseating toxins. Breakfasts for the monkeys became rituals of self-administered poisonings, with bouts of hapless gorging followed by episodes of perfunctory vomiting. Ostensibly freed from the top-down control of predators, the howler monkeys had entered a far nastier bottom-up realm run by plants.

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Ed. - finally, the islands end up being taken over by leaf-cutter ants - genus atta- no predators, no parasites, so they consumed everything.

The result was what came to be unfondly known by the Guri researchers as the post-Atta stage. The forest post-Atta was a depressing place where the leafiest, tastiest trees had been progressively replaced by walls of defensive vines and thickets of the thorniest, least-palatable plants of the forest, a place even the birds had abandoned. "It is one of the nastiest places you can imagine," said Ken Feeley, one of Terborgh's students and chief investigators on Guri. Feeley shuddered to remember the nastiest post-Atta island of all, an island the crew came to name Sudor, Spanish for "sweat". "We would go in with machetes, and we wouldn't know which way to turn," recalled Feeley. "There were more thorns than I ever thought possible. They're terrible places, the post-Atta forests. I don't know how else to describe them."

EDIT

Absolutely fascinating book.

[tabatha]

1. Yes, we're fouling our nests...

as Thom Hartmann just said in hour two of his program today - a must hear.

[phantom power]

2. I feel ill.

[hatrack]

3. Not all of that book is as dark as the outcomes described in Lago Guri

The chapter on the return of wolves to Yellowstone is truly heartening.

[wtmusic]

4. Thanks for rec. nt

[eppur_se_muova]

5. Reminescent of Quammen's "Song of the Dodo" (another good read). nt