[ClearCase_guy]

Wow!! This is exciting news! Wildlife biologists have really made a breakthrough here!

I suggest a catchy name for this new discovery. Perhaps "Predator-Prey Relationship" or something similar. They might even be able to come up with a fancy graph that shows prey populations increasing, but then the predator population increasing (a lagging indicator). Then the prey population line would crash, followed by the predator population crash. Then the cycle would be repeated in waves within the graph.

Really exciting!!

[Dallas59]

We got Eagles here in the States to take care of our "Lemmings"

[Gorjus]

Then the cycle would be repeated in waves within the graph.

One of the ecological truisms I learned back in the pre-PC era was that the scale of the cycles can be smoothed by clipping off the peaks so that the resulting valley is not so deep. In other words, if they deliberately thinned out (that means, 'killed') some of the predators during their peak so that they didn't wipe out so many lemmings, then a stable balance could be reached with less death by predation of the lemmings and (lagging) death by starvation for the predators.

So, here's the plan. Get a bunch of hunters to go to lemming-rich areas just before the bust and shoot a lot of snowy owls and foxes.

Yeah, that'd work. All the tree-huggers'd just love that.

[CanisRex]

Maybe they'll even show us a graphical representation of a "food chain" so that we can see exactly how the "predator-prey relationship" fits into what they might call, the... uh... how's "ecosystem" strike you?

Man, I wish Mrs. Nutbush, my 12th grade biology teacher were alive to see this monumental news...