How Nature Relies on Apex Predators
A lot of people don’t know how important Apex predators are to Earth. In an ecosystem, there are the animals at the top of the food chain and at the bottom of the food chain. It’s the circle of life. Sometimes we feel bad for those animals that get eaten all the time, but if they weren’t eaten, if there were too many of them, then the whole ecosystem would be destroyed.
A perfect example of how important these Apex predators are to the environment, and why we just need to leave wildlife alone, is when the wolves were removed from Yellowstone. The whole ecosystem fell apart. Since the wolves weren’t around to hunt the elk, there were too many elk. The elk ate all the grass and all of the trees’ leaves and everything was parched and brown. Elk stayed in one place for most of the time since there were no wolves to fear, and ate all the vegetation near the river. Without shade from the trees to cool the rivers, rivers eroded and became warmer in temperature. Soon there was a lack of fish. Birds who usually nested by the riverbanks couldn’t nest there any more since the riverbanks were gone. Beavers had to use willow trees to build dams, but there were no more willow trees, so the beavers started disappearing. 1 Herbivores were around valleys and gorges since wolves couldn’t hunt them, blocking birds, beavers, mice and bears from living there. 2 The plant life wasn’t nearly as beautiful and healthy as it had been before. As you can see, all of these effects snowball into one another, and that happened all because the wolves were removed from the food chain. The wolves keep Yellowstone and other habitats that they live in natural and healthy. Right now wolves are being shot because they are eating people’s crops. Instead of shooting these wolves, we should be thinking of creative ways to protect crops, and realizing why these wolves are needed and should actually be protected.
It is not just wolves that control an ecosystem and keep it healthy. All of the Apex predators in any food chain of any ecosystem that you can think of are essential to the survival of that place. Sharks and lions/lionesses are Apex predators that need to be protected and are necessary. If you removed a shark or lion or any other Apex predator from an ecosystem, you would get similar effects that Yellowstone had, just adjusted to that particular ecosystem.
The main thing that we can do to protect these animals is to support them and to understand why they are not actually bad, but are valuable and important to the earth. Some people feel like they need to shoot and kill Apex predators because they kill other animals, but really these animals are just doing their job in the world. If we continue to protect these animals and respect their habitats, then we will be doing our part in protecting them.
Image: Marc-Olivier Jodoin (unsplash.com)