When the Cat’s Away, the Mice Will…Reshape Entire Ecosystems?

The bushbucks were getting bold.

Scientists had been observing these normally forest-dwelling antelopes in Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park for decades and, typically, the skittish bushbucks avoided venturing away from the edge of the woods, relying instead on the cover of vegetation as camouflage. But in recent seasons, researchers noted with surprise that the animals were braving lunch in the open grasslands where predators lurked.

Well, used to lurk, anyway: Poaching and violence during Mozambique’s fifteen-year civil war, which ended in the mid-1990s, extirpated the bushbuck’s chief predators: leopards and wild dogs. With no fear of being eaten, the antelopes gorged themselves on the thick grasses and shoots of the plains, better forage than that found in the forest. In turn, the grasslands were quickly overgrazed. Fear, or, in the case of the bushbucks, the absence of it, was actually reshaping this part of Mozambique’s ecosystem.

That was the argument put forward in a 2019 paper by a team of Princeton