The Ecology of Fear

I am about to go to bed after a delightful day spent boating and eating pie up here in Maine. I had my first "bumbleberry" pie - which turned out to be a mixture of different kinds of berries. Disappointing, I was hoping to discover a new fruit, called the bumbleberry. Anyways, here are a few good news items to check out. The first is about the burgeoning power of blogging - a writer for Forbes magazine created a blog written in the imagined voice of Steve Jobs, the CEO of Apple. Reporters have just figured out who was behind it, and only after "Fake Steve" became enormously popular. The article I read was in the New York Times, but the story has been followed by many different publications.

Another one to check out is called, "Yellowstone's wolves save its aspens" from The New York Times. It describes how since wolves have been reintroduced to Yellowstone, the Aspen populations have begun to recover. This is partially due to the fact that the wolves eat elk, which graze on baby Aspen trees. However, it is more directly due to the fact that many elk are now afraid to graze in open areas where baby trees are growing. Therefore, it is the "ecology of fear" which allows for the restoration of the aspens. Pretty neat.

http://www.treesforlife.org.uk/images/aspen.jpg