Blink

Oh, right.  I’ve a blog.  Must do something with that soon.  Here goes.

It seems that down on the Southern Shore of Newfoundland, in the Avalon Wilderness Area, a protected conservation region, there was a strain of the Canadian Lynx unique to the island; a distinct subspecies, as it were.  Like lynx everywhere they subsisted primarily on the snowshoe hare.

As with all things, the health of the lynx population was inextricably linked to that of the hare.  As the numbers of one rose and fell, so did the other.  Kind of like the fishery.  Some twenty years ago, however, when I was but a wee lad, a virulent fever of myxomatosis swept through the ranks of the snowshoe hares, leaving their numbers so low that the provincial biologists feared that their recovery would take years, if they recovered at all.

Of course, as the hares sickened and died in mid-wuffle, the lynxes started finding food scarcer and scarcer.  They too started dying, not of sickness, but starvation.  The population fell and fell and not the best efforts of conservationists province-wide could break the downward plunge.

At last, the Southern Shore lynxes were down to two females and one male.  Notoriously shy, like all their kind, they eluded capture, until, at last, weakened by chronic malnutrition and the endless, fruitless quest for sustenance, the male died.

Bereft of their Y-chromosome provider, it mattered not that hare population rebounded and the two remaining females lived out long and happy lives in a wilderness booming with game.  The future Newfoundland subspecies of Canadian lynx died with that male. . . . . . .

Thus proving the old adage that a strain is only as strong as its weakest lynx.

(Actually, the Newfoundland lynx is doing just fine, thanks for asking.)