Kill all the big beasts, impoverish an ecosystem

• Autores: Michael Marshall
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 2930, 2013, pág. 13
• Idioma: inglés
• Texto completo no disponible (Saber más ...)
• Resumen

  • It's not just humans that still reel from the effects of a trauma many years later: ecosystems do too. Thousands of years after human hunters wiped out big land animals like giant ground sloths, the ecosystems they lived in are still experiencing the effects. Many ecosystems rely on big herbivores to spread nutrients, mostly in the form of dung. Here, Doughty and colleagues' simulation to the distribution of phosphorus, a nutrient that plants need to grow, in the Amazon basin in South America is discussed.