Science a GoGo's Home Page Forums General Discussion General Science Discussion Forum Woolly Mammoth Hair Yields 'Fantastic' DNA

Couldn't reintroducing a species have disastrous effects? I know that in Vermont we were once supposedly the oldest rain forest in the world, but the introduction of the steam engine caused 98% of all of Vermont's trees to be cut down. The forests have been replanted but many of the threes which used to thrive here are not resistant to many diseases which the trees before were, so they cannot live well here.

Somebody in the Vermont Legislature heard that porcupines from the south will eat the diseased wood from these trees, so they brought the porcupine up here. Unfortunately porcupines had no natural predators in Vermont so they thrived and became a nuisance because they would eat the diseased wood, but only after eating the healthy wood first. To counter this nuisance the Vermont Legislature opted to introduce the one animal which ate porcupines and that was the fisher. The Fisher did eat porcupines but according to myth only after eating everything else. There were stories of fishers eating household cats, dogs, and even attacking farmers on their tractors, so Vermont put a large bounty on fisher pelts.

Now that the fisher is close to extinction, the state of Vermont is reintroducing them because they have found many of these stories false and that the fisher was actually doing a good job keeping the porcupine population in check. With all that said, none of these problems would have occurred if people were smart enough not to cut down all the trees and to replant at least one tree for every cut down, but when you introduce a new animal into an ecology its presence could have disastrous effects.