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Jack rabbits vanish from Yellowstone, ecologists puzzled mongabay.com February 14, 2008
Writing in the journal Oryx, Dr. Joel Berger and colleagues report no confirmed jack rabbit sightings in Yellowstone since 1991 and only three in Grand Teton since 1978. White-tailed jack rabbits were once abundant in the region. "It could be disease, extreme weather, predation or other factors," said lead author Berger, a Wildlife Conservation Society conservationist and professor at the University of Montana. "Since the rabbits blipped off without knowledge, there has simply been no way to get at the underlying cause."
"Lacking a sense of historical conditions, it will always be difficult to decide whether current systems function ecologically like past ones," said Dr. Berger. "Reintroduction [of rabbits] may result in the establishment of dynamic ecological processes that were intact before rabbits vanished from the ecosystem. From the perspective of ecological health and wildlife conservation, reintroduction would also show that species loss has serious ecological costs."
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