It was not always so. Paleontologists tell us that we are simply several million years too late to witness the South American Serengeti. Back in the Pliocene epoch, about 5.3 to 2.6 million years before the present, a rich megafauna filled South American forests, savannas, and pampas. Giant ground sloths rose up on their hind legs like giraffes to browse tree branches. Swamp mammals the size of hippos and rhinos crashed through the canebrakes. Across the grasslands galloped camel-like creatures. Around the waterholes lurked long-fanged marsupials that shared a common ancestor with opossums but bore a remarkable resemblance to saber-toothed cats.
The large mammals were basically done for before humans arrived, likely as a result of climate change. During most of the Age of Mammals—when the class Mammalia first evolved about 60 million years ago, after the ebb of the dinosaurs—South America was a continental island, and its unusual mammalian fauna evolved in isolation from the fauna of other continents. The first and probably greatest wave of extinctions occurred during the Great American Interchange about 4 million years ago, when the Isthmus of Panama rose above sea level, and resulted in a massively biased colonization. North American mammals flooded into South America and are now major components of the fauna (the maned wolf among them). Many fewer South American mammals became established in North America, and today only three species—the Virginia opossum, the porcupine, and the nine-banded armadillo—still survive there. Interestingly, two of the three species of our focus in this chapter—anteater and armadillo—are remnants of that native South American fauna.
When the renowned paleontologist George Gaylord Simpson came out with his 1980 classic Splendid Isolation: The Curious History of South American Mammals, he highlighted the divergent route South American mammals took in evolution because of physical barriers posed by the oceans and the flooded isthmus, as well as by the Andes, high deserts, and rain forests. These virtual fences prevented the mixing of the fauna. Thirty years after the publication of his work, intensive human activities including agricultural expansion, settlement, and transportation infrastructure, rather than mountain ranges or large rivers, have become the great isolators. The results, too, threaten millions of years of evolution. The IUCN Red List now includes many formerly common species that cannot persist in human-dominated landscapes, such as many antelope species and other large, hoofed mammals that used to migrate across large grasslands.
I asked Leandro and Carly to assess which of the mammals they were studying would survive in the face of expanding agriculture. I wondered if it was an ecological stretch for the grassland-loving mammals to occupy soybean fields, should landowners happen to allow it. Alternatively, I wondered whether some might be preadapted to colonize and persist in another open habitat, albeit one with a monoculture of soy, or on cattle ranches where the grass was cropped to the ground.
Carly’s scat data showed that the answer varied, depending on the species. Maned wolves preferred Emas’s grasslands and avoided closed-canopy forests inside and outside the park. Surprisingly, maned wolf scats were quite common out in the soy, however. She attributed the presence of the species there to the abundance of rodents, its dietary staple. Soy acted like natural vegetation and gave the rodents shelter. As long as they could go a-ratting, the wolves seemed to do fine in the croplands. Carly noted, “In spite of its shy nature, the maned wolf is adapting to expansion of agriculture.” Maned wolves are common in Brazil’s agriculture-dominated landscapes, at least those of soy, it seems, because they are not persecuted as is the gray wolf in northern climes. Maned wolves tend to avoid cattle ranchlands, though, as those lands are too bare even for rats.
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Add CommentShort answer: no, they can't co-exist when their entire ecosystem is being co-opted for rapidly changing monoculture cultivation.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisOne way we might co-exist with the natural world, not just a few endangered species:
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Man's presence may very well be the precursor to the next mass extinction. We have been very busy setting the stage
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisfor the big event. As if born to dig up the the remains
of previous existence to repeat the cycle. It may require
a large space rock to save the planet from us. Nature rebooting.