As Big Animals Poop out.docVIP

As Big Animals Poop out 　　Long after the dinosaurs died out some 65 million years ago， many giants continued to roam the Earth. Some mammals were big as backhoes！ Mammoths grazed on grasslands， and elephant-sized ground sloths tore apart tree branches with sharp claws. Millions of whales cruised the oceans. 　　Collectively， these megafauna ― the scientific term for very large animals ― ate mega-size meals. Then they went on to shed mega-quantities of poop. 　　And that was a good thing. The huge quantities of feces shed by the big animals contained leftover nutrients from the food on which they had dined. That poop fed a global cycle that moved nutrients like phosphorus and iron from the ocean to the land. These nutrients fed plants， animals and other organisms around the world. 　　But this cycle has shrunk dramatically， a new study finds. By virtue of their size， big animals can quickly move lots of nutrients across large distances. Most of the worlds giant mammals， though， are now extinct. There are a few left， like rhinos， elephants and whales. But there were far more in the past. Almost everywhere looked like an African savanna， notes an ecologist of the University of Oxford in England. 　　Since then， however， humans have killed off many of the big animals， mostly for food. Large animal species that still exist are far fewer in number than they once were. Plus， people have been altering ecosystems in ways that can make it harder for important players in the nutrient cycle to survive. 　　As the numbers of whales and fish have been falling， fewer ocean nutrients have been reaching the land. Of nutrients that do， fewer are traveling inland as fast as they once did. Without those nutrients， plants wont be able to grow as well. As a result， the total weight of all the Earths vegetation will decline， observes Joe Roman. A coauthor of the new study， Roman is a biologist at the University of Vermont in Burlington. 　　The decline in vegetation will have a cascade of