Picture a string of remote Alaskan islands so lush they resembled gigantic meadows floating in the Bering Sea. Now think of those very islands, decades later, stripped of their low scrubby plants, with few birds left in the sky. That transformation actually happened, and the surprising culprit was foxes.
In the study ‘Introduced Predators Transform Subarctic Islands from Grassland to Tundra,’ published in Science, biologist Donald Croll and co-authors found that introducing Arctic foxes to Alaska’s Aleutian Islands devastated local seabird colonies. It changed island ecosystems, replacing grassy areas with tundra. This is a pretty wild example if you ever wondered how one small human decision can quietly rewire nature for a century.
