What If Gone

Species → Canada Lynx

Canada Lynx

Lynx canadensis

no reliable global estimate exists; populations considered secure in…
Extinction risk Least Concern
Predator-prey cycleBoreal forestSpecialist predatorArctic environment
Canada Lynx (Lynx canadensis)
Photo: Michael Zahra, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 3.0)

What if it disappeared?

Impact High
1 year

Without the lynx to hunt it, one of the snowshoe hare's main sources of predation pressure vanishes at once: a field experiment showed that excluding mammalian predators, including the lynx, doubles hare density compared to control plots.

Documented
Detail

Krebs, C.J., Boutin, S., Boonstra, R. et al. (1995). Impact of Food and Predation on the Snowshoe Hare Cycle. Science, 269(5227), 1112–1115.

A factorial experiment on one-square-kilometer plots in southwestern Yukon compared control plots to plots where mammalian predators — including the lynx — were fenced out. Predator exclusion alone doubled hare density; combined with supplemental food, it pushed density up to 11 times the control level, proof that predation alone carries substantial weight in hare population size.

10 years

But removing the lynx specifically likely isn't the same as removing every predator: unlike the coyote, which can fall back on other prey, the lynx hunts almost nothing but hare — losing the lynx would likely dampen the hare cycle's swings without erasing them entirely.

Extrapolated
Detail

Extrapolation à partir de O'Donoghue, Boutin, Krebs et al. (1998). Functional responses of coyotes and lynx to the snowshoe hare cycle. Ecology, 79(4), 1193–1208, qui compare le comportement de chasse des deux prédateurs sans mesurer l'effet du retrait du seul lynx.

The study shows that the lynx and coyote, predators of comparable size, differ sharply in their ability to catch replacement prey when hares become scarce: the coyote shifts its diet, the lynx much less so. This asymmetry suggests the lynx's role in the cycle's troughs is not interchangeable with the coyote's.

What's missing to confirm it: No field experiment has excluded the lynx alone, leaving other predators in place, to directly measure how much the hare cycle would persist without it specifically.

100 years

Over a century, the roughly 9.6-year cycle that shaped hare and lynx populations across two centuries of fur records would likely blur: generalists like the coyote would take over part of the vacated role, but without recreating the tight link that once bound the hare to its former specialist predator.

Hypothesis
1000 years

Over a thousand years, a permanently weakened predator-prey cycle would eventually feed through to the browsing of willow, birch and poplar in the boreal forest, whose regrowth depends on the hare population's own highs and lows — a forest whose regeneration rhythm would never quite settle back into the same cadence.

Hypothesis

Documentation

Last verified: August 16, 2026

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