Why did the removal of wolves affect the entire ecosystem?

Answer 1

Well, let's think about this for a minute and you'll see how everything is connected on our planet.

Wolves are predators. They eat things like mice and rats, rabbits, deer and even other smaller predators like coyotes and snakes.

If you take the predators out of a system, the prey animals overpopulate because nothing is eating them. They eat all the food in the area and then they starve and the other herbivores starve because they don't have any food either. The animals are also less healthy because the wolves killed off the sickly and weak animals and left the stronger ones alive to reproduce.

With the plants all eaten in that area, the land has nothing to hold it in place and erosion really starts wearing it away and even causing floods and mudslides if it's bad enough.

On a human perspective, now you've got all those pest animals like rats and rabbits and deer overpopulating and moving into human areas. They eat our gardens and food crops, they ruin things by chewing on them or pooping in them, and they carry diseases that we can catch. Humans aren't very good at being predators either - hunters don't want the sick and weak animals so they kill off the strongest ones and leave the weak ones to reproduce, which ends up with a sickly population of animals.

It would have been nice if people had left the larger predators in place and just stayed out of their territories so they could have controlled the ecosystem the way they're supposed to do.