The disappearance of elephants and other large land animals could have a devastating and permanent effect on plants and animals they live with, say researchers.
When they analyzed large animal, or megafauna, extinctions in the Americas since humans moved in about 15,000 years ago, they discovered long-lasting changes in the local landscape after the largest of the land animals—among them mammoths and mastodons—disappeared.
Recent studies point to the loss of mammoths, native horses, and other large animals in Alaska and the Yukon as the reason a productive mix of forest and grassland turned into unproductive tundra that dominates the region today.
Similarly, mammoth and mastodon extinctions in the Pacific Northwest and the northeastern United States seemed to have changed the vegetation and, in the western United States, decreased the diversity of small mammals, says study leader Anthony Barnosky, professor of integrative biology at the University of California, Berkeley.
“Ecological studies have shown that if you pull out a top predator or a key herbivore today, you get dramatic change in the ecosystem. Our study makes it clear that in the past, such changes have lasted for thousands of years. These extinctions really do permanently change the dynamics. You can’t go back.”
Yet not all extinctions left major changes in the ecosystem. Ground sloth and glyptodont extinctions in South America had no noticeable effect on the vegetation of Patagonia and the Pampas, for example.
“It’s not a simple story, where if you pull out a big beast you see major changes in the landscape,” Barnosky says. “It’s actually dependent on how big a beast you pull out, and also how that beast interacts with the plants and animals in the area, and what other plants and animals are there. It depends on what the animal does for a living.”
Large browsers like mammoths, mastodons, and today’s elephants, for example, eat small trees and shrubs and uproot or break down trees, as well as trample and churn the soil. Other large herbivores, such as bison and moose, also keep shrubs in check and change soil structure and nutrients as they feed, defecate, and urinate. As a result, such large-bodied plant eaters play a key role in keeping forests from overrunning grasslands, as the group found happened in North America.
Ecosystems Changed Forever
“You see the impact of defaunation today in Africa, where the removal of elephant populations has led to these shrubby, scraggly acacias filling the savanna landscape,” says coauthor Charles Marshall, professor of integrative biology and director of the University of California Museum of Paleontology. “Africa today, with its elephant populations, seems to fit the model of North America with its mammoths and mastodons.”
In the Pampas of Argentina, however, the disappearance of the South American mastodon had no observable effect on the flora and fauna, probably because the weather and rainfall are not conducive to forests.
Understanding these relationships can be important today in targeting conservation efforts, says postdoctoral fellow Emily Lindsey.
“This information could be useful to conservation biologists in pinpointing which types of ecosystems are likely to be affected by global climate change, and which would be most responsive to conservation and restoration efforts,” she says.
The current study, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, captures only the grossest environmental changes resulting from large-mammal extinctions, since not all ecosystem changes leave traces in the fossil record, Barnosky cautions.
“The fact that we saw the impact we saw is a pretty robust conclusion that these ecosystems were changed forever by the disappearance of these animals. Anytime you pull a big animal out of an ecosystem, there are some pretty huge effects, as demonstrated by ecologists today. But they might not be recognizable in the fossil record.”
The new research was sparked by other ecological studies on the impacts of adding or subtracting large mammals such as deer and elk from American landscapes, or removing wildebeest and elephants in Africa.
