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RE: Why environment matters: St Matthew Island comic (Director's commentary)
Sad that it ended up that way.. total black swan event. What could've been done to prevent that? Or was it an unknown when before it happened?
I wrote a blog post where I described the ecology behind the St Matthew Island scenario.
It is unclear whether they totally "bred themselves to death", or whether there was a particularly bitter Arctic winter that killed them off.
But the reindeer are often used as a mammal equivalent of the popular analogy of the "bacteria in a test tube", who consume all of the nutrients, and then collapse.