http://www.esa.org/esablog/ecology-in-policy/threatened-no-more-the-lake-erie-watersnake%e2%80%99s-road-to-recovery/ Ecological science, news, and policy from the Ecological Society of America Tue, 11 Jun 2013 00:19:25 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 http://www.esa.org/esablog/ecology-in-policy/threatened-no-more-the-lake-erie-watersnake%e2%80%99s-road-to-recovery/comment-page-1/#comment-35041 Matt Chew Thu, 25 Aug 2011 19:39:09 +0000 http://www.esa.org/esablog/?p=5740#comment-35041 The real story is that snake demography is changing in response to the availability of round gobies, and that the gobies have become necessary to maintain snake populations. Insinuating that predation by 12K snakes on a few islands does much of anything to regulate round goby populations in Lake Erie is plainly untenable. Anything else that crashes round goby populations will also crash the snake populations. There can be ‘alien’ gobies AND ‘native endemic’ snakes, or neither. According to conventional, nostalgia-based conservation standards this outcome is a nightmarish irony. But as an object lesson in real-world evolutionary ecology, it’s outstanding.

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