Technical Description

1. How Trophic Cascades Work
The first thing to understand is that in nature every organism effects another organism one way
or another. Most everything gets preyed upon by something, and even the top predators that
don’t still get eaten by something when thy die. It’s like the cycle of life in the Lion King. When
looking at predator prey relationships it is important to understand that a balance is needed. If
there were 95 predators and 5 prey then the predators are going to die off due to lack of prey. If
you switch it around and have 95 prey and 5 predators it is likely that the prey will increase to a
high population. There it provides ample amounts of food for the predators to grow in population
enough to where they then overtake the prey population and send it back into the first cycle of
too many predators.
This is referred as a
boom and bust cycle.
This cycle is shown in
(Figure 1). Every
ecosystem needs moder-
ation. The predator
without the prey or the
other way around
doesn’t
work. There is an
ecological equilibrium
that is needed in every
ecosystem. That is what
wildlife managers aim
to achieve.
Knowing that each ecosystem
needs a middle ground helps to
understand the picture to the
right. In an ecosystem without a
predator the ecosystem gets
degraded due to overgrazing and
overutilization. When predators
are in the environment it
promotes movement and species
diversity.
Visual Sources:
Figure 1. https://braddlibby.wordpress.com/2010/08/03/ask-the-chicken-philosopher-2/
Figure 2. https://www.britannica.com/science/trophic-cascade
Figure 1. Shows the relationship between predator and prey.
Figure 2. Shows the ecological state with large predators, then again without.