C. Moore,
The only reason that African savannah predators don't wipe out
their prey species is that they can't catch them. Predators lead lives of
violent desperation and die of hunger and disease. Cheetahs are a
particularly good example of this. Anyone who lives in the western New
Jersey suburbs can tell you that deer do very well indeed without
predation. What happens is that such traits as shyness/skittishness
(which actually seems to have some genetic roots in simpler animals) and
diurnality/nocturnality are no longer selected against. Since these
traits are not a problem in a suburb full of well-tended gardens, deer
populations increase rapidly and establish themselves up to new limits.
The introduction of foreign species shows how little regard Nature has for
balance. Rabbits still have no natural enemies in Australia. The zebra
mussel is doing very well in America and finding no benthic competition to
speak of. The Nile perch is doing a nice job reducing the number of
cichlid species in the African Great Lakes. In natural systems we can
talk about marsh grasses which make life difficult for other plant species
and my favorites: the mosses and algaes. These little buggers use
chemical warfare to snuff out opposition and thereby dominate high
nutrient content environments. And then there are the viruses. Viruses
have no capacity to limit themselves because they don't behave at all.
They just reproduce. If a species is unfortunate enough to get a virus
that has its number, the end is nigh.
To listen to some ecologists, you'd think that extinction and
evolution never occurred. I don't see any dinosaurs around. Do you?
Under my tree I learned that concepts like balance, cycles and
self-limitng are what is caled name-and-form. As such they are illusions.
Everything in the universe is impermanent. So say the *real* bodhisattvas.
peace
