"This is what happens when an apex predator collides with an ecosystem engineer."
"Beavers are influential. By cutting trees and damming streams, these rodents change the world around them, raising water levels and creating habitats for diverse plants, insects, fish and more. They are some of the world’s best-known ecosystem engineers, a term for species that produce outsize effects on their environments.
Wolves are powerful. As apex predators, their facility at killing reverberates down the food web, and their direct effect on prey species may affect vegetation, other animals and even how streams flow.
So what happens when an apex predator meets — and eats — an ecosystem engineer? This clash-of-titans question underlies a study published Wednesday in Proceedings of the Royal Society B, that investigated how wolves affect beaver activity, and thus forest composition, in Voyageurs National Park in northern Minnesota.
The study found that wolves attack beavers that strike out farther from their homes, and thus they limit the extent to which beavers can down trees and transform a landscape. (A previous study by many of the same authors showed that wolves also prevent wetland creation by killing beavers.)"
Cara Giaimo reports for the New York Times November 7, 2023.
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