Why Bambi should've used birth control: a dimly remembered cautionary tale.

January 20, 2012 1:15 AM

I can recall a text-book case of introducing a species (deer) into a new environment, where a lack of natural predators caused a population boom, followed by local extinction. I remember most of the details but I can't find the actual cite. Please help!

The story goes: there's a very remote island in an ocean/sea that had a US military outpost established on it, maybe a hundred years ago. The island was pretty small, and in order to give the soldiers meat in their diet, a couple of deer were introduced onto the island. Soon after, the outpost packed up and left.

A couple of years later sailors visited the island and discovered that the deer population had increased significantly. They hunted to their hearts content and sailed away. A few years after that, new visitors to the island recorded an enormous explosion in the number of deer. After a few more years, another visit was made and not a single deer remained alive. They were all dead from starvation and malnutrition, and the island was littered with carcasses and skeletons.

It may have been on damninteresting (or a similar site) but nothing turns up there, and deer overpopulation on islands is a common enough problem (albeit not so starkly illustrated) that Google can't really help. Can you help me find a citation for this happy story?

posted by ianso to Science & Nature (4 answers total)

Best answer: Wikipedia: "In 1944, 29 reindeer were introduced to the island by the United States Coast Guard to provide an emergency food source. The coast guard abandoned the island a few years later, leaving the reindeer. Subsequently, the reindeer population rose to about 6,000 by 1963 and then died off in the next two years to 43 animals. A scientific study attributed the population crash to the limited food supply in interaction with climatic factors (the winter of 1963–64 was exceptionally severe in the region). By the 1980s, the reindeer population had completely died out."
posted by foleypt at 1:34 AM on January 20, 2012 [1 favorite]

Response by poster: Thanks foleypt! That's perfect :-)
posted by ianso at 2:26 AM on January 20, 2012

There's even a comic.
posted by arzakh at 4:06 AM on January 20, 2012 [4 favorites]

If you ever go to the University of Iowa, they have (or had, it may be gone now) one of my favorite things ever: the Laysan Island Cyclorama. It tells the tale of Max Schlemmer, who imported rabbits to the island as a food source.

The narration includes the unforgettable line: "They nibbled their way to oblivion."
posted by fifteen schnitzengruben is my limit at 10:34 AM on January 20, 2012 [1 favorite]