Kill all the big beasts, impoverish an ecosystem

摘要

It's not just humans that still reel from the effects of a trauma many years later: ecosystems do too. Thousands of years after human hunters wiped out big land animals like giant ground sloths, the ecosystems they lived in are still experiencing the effects. Many ecosystems rely on big herbivores to spread nutrients, mostly in the form of dung. "If you remove the big animals from an ecosystem, you pretty much stop nutrients moving," says Chris Doughty at the University of Oxford.