Species
American Bison
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The largest land mammal in North America, once numbering in the tens of millions across the continent's grasslands before nineteenth-century commercial hunting and a deliberate campaign to undermine Plains nations who depended on the herds reduced the wild population to only a few hundred animals by the 1880s. Yellowstone National Park sheltered one of the last wild herds through that collapse and remains the only place bison have lived continuously since prehistoric times without ever being fully extirpated and reintroduced. Bison graze in large mixed herds, wallow in dust and mud to coat themselves against insects and shed fur, and their grazing pattern shapes prairie plant diversity in ways ecologists consider close to the pattern the grassland evolved under, a role modern conservation herds are managed in part to restore.
Facts
Disputed
Population EstimateFigure is for bison in herds managed specifically for conservation rather than commercial production, the count the IUCN assessment treats as most meaningful for the subspecies' ecological recovery; several hundred thousand additional bison exist in commercial herds not counted toward this figure, and which total better represents the species' true recovery is a genuine point of disagreement among conservationists. Scientific Name Conservation StatusAssessed as Near Threatened rather than a more severe category because total numbers have recovered into the hundreds of thousands; the qualification is that the great majority live in commercial herds managed for meat production, not for ecological or genetic conservation, so the number of bison filling something like their historical ecological role is far smaller than the total count alone suggests. Cross-Tradition Connections
In Biome
In Ecosystem
The bison is the defining large grazer of the North American Plains, both historically (tens of millions before the 19th century collapse) and in today's restored conservation herds.
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