AMERICAN BISON: A NATURAL HISTORY

By J. O. Wolff, D. F. Lott. 2002

119 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This, the sixth in the Organisms and Environments series from the University of California Press, is a compilation of natural history and personal accounts by Dale Lott, an Emeritus Professor at the University of California, Davis, who died earlier this year. Professor Lott’s personal history with bison was long and deep, his maternal grandfather having served as the first superintendent of the first federal bison refuge, the National Bison Range, in western Montana. Lott spent some of his first years there, knew people who figured centrally in early conservation efforts, and was deeply affected by the experience. During his academic career, which spanned the years 1965–1994, Lott focused his research in part on bison behavior and demography, but this book is more multifaceted. The first section, comprising three chapters, describes bison behavior vividly, using anecdotes from the author’s experience to exemplify important events in the interactions among various sex and age cohorts. These excellent portrayals give the reader a sense for what it is like to observe bison close at hand for many hours, which Lott clearly did. The second section of three chapters is ecophysiological, explaining the process by which energy flows from prairie grasses through bison digestive systems to produce bison chips. The principles of this system will be familiar to many readers, but are still interesting and well portrayed. Part 3 of the book reviews bison evolution in the last million or so years and explores the interesting question of how many bison populated the continent when Europeans arrived. Lott concludes that the traditional estimate of 60 million is high by a few tens of millions. The next section,

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Citations in the corpus

Female mate choice based upon male motor performance (2010, background): “intromission, and males often maintain intromission until ejaculation by running behind the female on their hindlegs for up to 100 m (Lott 2002).”
Evidence for geographic variation in the diets of late Pleistocene and early Holocene Bison in North America, and differences from the diets of recent Bison (2007, background): “Modern populations of plains Bison are diminished and anthropogenically disturbed with altered genetics (Lott, 2002), population dynamics, ecology, and behavior (Berger and Cunningham, 1994).”