In the National Geographic article, "How a 3-Ton Mess of Dead Pigs Transformed This Landscape," by Christie Wilcox, we are introduced to the experiment done by Brandon Barton of Mississippi State University and his colleagues, who decided to see how a mass mortality event of a species would affect the environment. In nature, mass mortality sometimes happens. More than 200,000 saiga antelopes in Kazakhstan drop dead in a matter of weeks; 337 dead whales wash up in a remote fjord in southern Chile; some 300 reindeer in Norway are felled by a single bolt of lightning— all that has happened since 2015. There’s evidence such spectacular displays of death are increasing in frequency due to climate change. These events have been happening, but no information has been obtained on how these mass mortality events have affected the environment. So these scientists decided, since they can't predict when a mass mortality event will take place they will create one of their own. Wildlife biologist Marcus Lashley of Mississippi State had connections with people at state and federal agencies who are responsible for combating a wildlife pest that currently plagues Mississippi and many other states. A few phone calls later, the dead feral pigs started streaming in. In the end, 6,000 pounds of dead feral pigs. These scientists received permission to make use of university-owned forest land for their research, allowing 3-tons of carcasses to be dumped into their study plots and left to rot.
Almost immediately, vultures and maggots invaded these corpses, which were to be expected, but the intensity of the response awed the researchers. Many other creatures started to appear and tear apart the ground and surrounding plants, wrecking the plant communities, which allowed new species to colonize the area. Even now, more than a year later, the sites remain ecologically scarred. For Tomberlin, the experiment has highlighted the environmental impact of culling feral pigs. The pigs are invasive species themselves, and they do considerable damage, but the paradox, Tomberlin says, is that killing them on a large scale may actually promote the spread of other invasive species. news.nationalgeographic.com/2017/09/dead-feral-pig-science-ecology/
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