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Heres a program from our archives.Yellowstone National Park is home to wide variety of native plants and animals, but there is one animal that is conspicuously absent. I'm Jim Metzner and this is the Pulse of the Planet.ambience, wolf Fischer: The reason we don't have wolves in Yellowstone is because they were eradicated because of concerns that wolves would consume too many of the bison and elk in the park.Hank Fischer is the Northern Rockies regional representative for the Defenders of Wildlife. He's part of a campaign to reintroduce wolves to Yellowstone Park.Fischer: To put things in perspective, at the turn of the century in the United States, particularly in the west, species like elk and bison were near extinction. Commercial exploitation of those animals by early settlers had severely depleted most big game populations. Consequently, a place like Yellowstone was devoting most of its energy in trying to restore species like the bison and the elk. And it just didn't seem like there was room in Yellowstone for a predator at that time.But times have changed, and elk and deer are flourishing without any natural predators to keep them in check.Fischer: If left unregulated, these populations of deer and elk often increase to extremely large numbers, to the point where they can be destructive to the range that they live on, and in fact, eat so much of that range that when a hard winter comes, starvation can be the result, and large die-backs in those populations. We saw exactly that happen in Yellowstone park in the winter of 1988, where we had more than 5000 elk die of starvation, specifically because their numbers had grown larger than what the available range could support.This archival program is part of our thirtieth anniversary celebration. If you want hear more, check out our podcast.