Carroll is executive producer of Nature’s Fear Factor, which tells the story of how ecologists are trying to bring endangered African painted dogs back to Gorongosa. He leads the Department of Science Education of the Howard Hughes Medical Institute and is chair of biology at the University of Maryland. Carroll, “is that predators can shape behavior.”Ĭarroll is the author, most recently, of A Series of Fortunate Events: Chance and the Making of the Planet, Life, and You. “The really interesting idea,” says Sean B. Ecologists studying Gorongosa say that’s created an imbalance, and not only because predators regulate populations of their prey by eating them. Apart from lions, other big predators have yet to return. Just a generation later, it’s a conservation success story, teeming once again with wildlife-but something vitally important is still missing. The destruction was so complete that many people doubted whether recovery was even possible.
Almost every large animal had been killed by soldiers and either eaten or sold. And the carnage was not restricted to humans: Gorongosa National Park, a 1,500-square-mile mosaic of habitats that was home to a richness of life almost unparalleled on Earth, had become a battlefield. When Mozambique’s civil war ended in 1992, more than 1 million people had lost their lives.
