Mammals

Abstract

Thirty years ago Lauckhart (1962) tried to convince his fellow wildlife managers in North America to “back off a great distance...and...view the whole picture of animal populations”. He then presented them with essentially the same picture which I am trying to present — that most individual animals die when young in a habitat which is saturated. They are passively limited by the inadequacy of their environment. As a consequence, their populations are constantly pressing hard against the carrying capacity of their habitat; and that capacity is set by the quality of their plant food. Plants, he said, have been able “to retreat below the animals’ threshold of malnutrition in order to escape total destruction by animals” (my emphasis), and it is this malnutrition, not predation (including human hunting) which determines the abundance of herbivorous mammals and birds. Judging by the slightly condescending questions published with his presentation, and the lack of notice taken of his views since, he was not too successful! Present day managers and conservationists would benefit from reading his simple but astute assessment of how the real world of nature works, and how human activity impinges on it. So too would my fellow ecologists!