The Nature Conservancy and the National Park Service deserve credit for removing the pigs from Santa Cruz Island. This was a ginormous project, with uncounted logistical and political hurdles. The pigs are now gone, and good riddance. A recent article in the Ventura County Star provided a layman’s view of the cosmetic changes that most people will see in coming years: “Sheep gone, cattle gone, horses gone, pigs gone, golden eagles gone. Bald eagles back, 30 or more nesting on the northern islands and producing chicks. Foxes free and rebounding, on Santa Cruz at least, their population on this island having tripled in the three years since they were federally listed as endangered. What all this means is that, for the first time in anyone’s memory, the story on Santa Cruz Island is mostly one of optimism. A tenuous balance has been restored, and the stage of recovery now beginning on the island involves birth, not death on the island.”

Cool. But for ecologists who think about this at all, we know that there’s much more going on here, and that what is happening on SCI right now is nothing short of chaos: ‘The inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a complex natural system.’ Precisely.

So, what happens now on SCI is anyone’s guess. As with most eradication programs, the ecological monitoring aspect of the project received much less funding than what was needed to truly document the resulting ecologic upheaval. As far as I know, other than some follow-up vegetation monitoring, there are no plans or projects scheduled to monitor small mammals, reptiles, landbirds, invertebrates, bats, or any aspect of ecosystem function now that the project is basically finished. Hopefully I’m wrong, and we can look forward in coming years to published results of how the island ecosystem has responded to pig removal, but I’m not holding my breath.

In the absence of monitoring or applied research data, ecologists often use to models to predict future change. This is a good approach, however to do so one needs some information on the current state of the system or elements of it in which one is interested, and in the case of large-scale management projects, the state prior to the manipulation. And the one published model that has been applied to an SCI ecological question was not successful in predicting anything; several years ago some folks said that by removing pigs prior to golden eagle removal the eagles would drive island foxes to extinction. This obviously didn’t happen, fortunately, and what this says about the model or modelers is unclear. The point is that there is nothing that takes the place of monitoring and research directed at specific questions to understand how our actions affect populations, species, and processes within ecosystems.

What happens on SCI now is anyone’s guess…