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How Wolves Change Rivers

Sustainable Human · 46.2M views · 2014-02-13 · 4:34

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Overview

George Monbiot narrates how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone after about 70 years set off a trophic cascade. The wolves changed deer behavior, vegetation recovered, and rivers changed course.

On Hacker News

HN cites it as the go-to example of how one keystone species can reshape an entire ecosystem.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 4 months · HN mentions 2014–2022

Topics

Animals & natureEnvironment, agriculture & food systems
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yellowstonewolveskeystone speciesecosystem restorationrewilding

What people said

heimatau · 2020-02 · Recommendation

This could be good for Colorado. I had to watch this video [1] for my biology class. It's interesting how the wolves changed the entire ecosystem by just changing the behavior of deer (they avoided grazing near the river because that's where the wolves wanted to be). The ripple effects are fairly significant. 1 - [VIDEO]

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GFischer · 2017-05 · Recommendation

I saw a pretty cool documentary on how reintroducing wolves to Yellowstone changed the ecosystem for the better. Not the one I saw but very similar: [VIDEO] More serious article: [LINK]

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nkoren · 2016-11 · Recommendation

You need to learn about trophic cascades. Here's a quick intro: [VIDEO] This played out in the Pleistocene extinctions to a very significant degree, having tremendous effect on ecosystems everywhere. Here's an entire conference worth of the subject: [LINK]

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Sources

Video by Sustainable Human, played through YouTube.

Data and selection notes

HN summaries and labels may contain AI errors. HN dates refer to discussions, not video publication.

HN Library: HackerTube export (2026-10-31) and open-index/hacker-news. Upstream summaries and classifications may contain AI errors.

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