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This is Scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Jason Goldman.

Large mammals can be lost from a particular place by being hunted or by the destruction of their habitat.

And the loss of these big animals can greatly affect the rest of their ecosystem.

Take elephants. They can leave deep footprints in soil. After it rains, each footprint becomes a tiny pond, which becomes a home to a variety of invertebrates. No elephants means no homes for those critters. So while it's

well known that the loss of large animals can mean bad news, just how pervasive those impacts

can be still remains unclear.

I spent a lot of time when I was there in these heavily hunted forests and in these pristine forests, well relatively pristine,

they weren't hunted, They were pretty protected and

remember. And just walking around I was noticing that there is a visual difference

in the amount of understory vegetation in these areas where the elephants and other large animals like forest buffalo are hunted out,

there was a lot more vegetation in the understory compared to deep within like the park where it was more protected and remote, it was a lot easier to walk around.

Rice University biologist Terrace Lamperti who conducted field field work in Gabon in West Central Africa.

If overhunting is allowing this vegetation to be released from herbivary and trampling,

I was imagining that would probably do a lot to the

understory environment and the microclimate that invertebrates are exposed to.

So Lampedi and her team compared the understory vegetation and biodiversity within

hunted and protected areas in northeastern Gabon.

They discovered that areas with fewer large mammals indeed had a thicker understory, as Lampede suspected.

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