Humans have mythologized large predators since time immemorial, but our scientific understanding of their importance has been slower to come than our appreciation of their formidable adaptations to their niche. Darwin chose wolves and deer as the first "textbook example" of natural selection. Indeed, many students have an intuitive grasp of predation's role as a major driver of the evolution of life's diversity because our current examples (Kettlewell's peppered moths, Endler's guppies) feature predation as the selective pressure.
It is perhaps more challenging to get students to appreciate the role of large predators as regulators of the overall health of ecosystems. As the film Lords of Nature points out, before Aldo Leopold "lifted the veil" to reveal the complexities of species interactions, such questions held little meaning for biologists. In a world without ecology as a scientific discipline, humans had all but eliminated large predators from the inhabited parts of...
University of California Press