Was Aldo Leopold right about the Kaibab deer herd?
A central paradigm in wildlife ecology is that predation is a good thing for prey species: predation limits the population of the prey, and keeps the prey from overpopulating and devastating the habitat. This appealing idea was advocated by Aldo Leopold, and he used the classic story of the Kaibab deer herd as an illustration. The wolves, lions, and coyotes on the Kaibab Plateau were decimated by government hunters after the plateau was established as a game preserve — and Leopold tells the story that the deer population exploded, the range was degraded, and the deer population crashed below the level that could have been sustained with a healthy amount of sustained predation. We challenged this idea by determining the cohort structure of aspen across the Plateau. High populations of starving deer should have prevented the establishment of aspen during the 1920s; if we found a sizable cohort from that period, Leopolds story would have to be wrong. Our descriptive and experimental inve
