I do like what the Zimov's are doing in trying to bring back the mammoth steppe ecosystem.
I just feel like they're focusing a bit too little on all the animals that aren't giant megafauna which made up the mammoth steppe ecosystem.
Pleistocene rewilding involves more than just bison and resurrected mammoths y'know?
So what animals would you introduce to pleistocene park if you were able? I've picked four bird species as examples just to get the ball rolling.
>cinereous vulture
Cinereous vultures are the second largest vulture species in the world and are also far more aggressive (and cold tolerant) than the andean condor which would make them a great cleanup crew. This problem becomes even more of an issue when you realize that corpses in the cold decompose way slower, and that hypothetical cloned mammoths would need a lot of vultures to get rid of the meat and prevent disease.
>golden eagle
This bird already lives near pleistocene park, so introduction should be fairly easy, and it serves as an invaluable apex predator in its ability to hunt smaller mammals, birds, and even medium sized mammals like deer, wolves, and mountain goats.
>rhea
This bird would act as a proxy for the extinct asian ostrich and/or pachystruthio, which was a bird that lived throughout the mammoth steppe thousands of years ago. Reason why actual ostriches couldn't be used is because they are not nearly cold hardy enough to survive in northern siberia, while rhea are far more cold tolerant.
>trumpeter swan
This giant bird would function well as prey for medium sized carnivores, and as a way to keep the water vegetation levels normal with all the introduced mammals creating tons of fertilizer.
There's a ton more animals you could bring in like striped hyenas, eurasian beavers, eurasian otters, siberian tigers, eurasian boar, wood frogs, wels catfish, etc. Possibilities are pretty endless.
Komodo dragons. Hundreds of thousands of Komodo dragons. Give them winter jackets if you must
Winter jackets wouldn't help a cold-blooded animal. It's like putting a blanket over a stone.
Why don't you just introduce them to Australia? Pleistocene rewilding includes more than just Eurasia, and Australia definitely needs it since it had the more of its megafauna disappear than any other continent by a lot.
Grab some aldabra giant tortoise, some long beaked echidna, some tasmanian devils, some dwarf/northern cassowaries, and some vultures.
That's about all that can be done for aussies outside of de-extinction now. Unless you wanna start introducing more invasive mammals to the poster child for invasive species problems. Outside of maybe Florida I guess.
Glyptodonts. All of them.
Why don't they do this in America? I mean we do have some unintentional introductions like feral horses and boars but I want some more.
Anyways my answer would be cougars
Isn't that kind of what we did with yellowstone in general? Especially since we reintroduced wolves.
Yes, and there should be more. Reintroduce cougars to the east, jaguars back into the southwest. Even do some more unconventional ones like lions into the midwest or tigers in Alaska for the hell of it.
The world should be more interesting.
People in America get pissy if you ask them to not kill coyotes. Only reason this shtick with the Zimovs could maybe work is because fricking nobody lives Siberia.
Nevermind that there never was a steppe-tundra in NA to begin with.
Doesn't matter, there are still supposed to be much more meadows and wetlands and barrens around than we have today.
It really says something that the only place you'll find those ecosystems nowadays are in clear cuts under powerlines and the sides of highways.
>Reintroduce cougars to the east,
there are catamounts all over appalachia though.
>thinks modern lions wouldnt die in the winter
They're not the same as the old lions that used to live in North America. An African lion of today would be absolutely fricked during winter. Tigers and the others would be fine. But if you think a lion will survive winter in the midwest you're especially moronic.
What about asiatic lions? They lived all the way up to the mountains of Persia and the Caucasus, and those places can get pretty damn cold.
I would set your mother free to roam the magnificent steppe-tundra with her kindred flocculant megafauna.
flocculent*
Nice new word I learned just now.
why do I even bother
Tyrannosaurus Rex