Sad that it ended up that way.. total black swan event. What could've been done to prevent that? Or was it an unknown when before it happened?
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Sad that it ended up that way.. total black swan event. What could've been done to prevent that? Or was it an unknown when before it happened?
I wrote a blog post where I described the ecology behind the St Matthew Island scenario.
It is unclear whether they totally "bred themselves to death", or whether there was a particularly bitter Arctic winter that killed them off.
But the reindeer are often used as a mammal equivalent of the popular analogy of the "bacteria in a test tube", who consume all of the nutrients, and then collapse.