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Science 30 November 2001:
Vol. 294. no. 5548, pp. 1847 - 1848
DOI: 10.1126/science.1067012
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Perspectives

ECOLOGY:
Dammed Experiments!

Jared Diamond

What happens to the animals and plants in a habitat when that habitat becomes fragmented? As Diamond explains in a Perspective, part of the answer comes from an unplanned experiment in Venezuela resulting from the formation of Lake Guri after dam construction (Terborgh et al.). The different-sized islands formed by damming demonstrate that habitat fragmentation results in loss of large predators first, leading to an explosion in the numbers of herbivores and a drastic reduction in palatable plant species.

The author is in the Department of Physiology, UCLA School of Medicine, Los Angeles, CA 90095, USA. E-mail: jdiamond{at}mednet.ucla.edu

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