I live in a small city in the US, where it’s grass everywhere. There’s lots of rabbits, but why aren’t there more? They eat grass, and there’s clearly more grass than they can eat at their current population size. There’s no significant predators to speak of, I don’t think. They breed legendarily quickly, there’s even an expression about it. So if food isn’t a constraint, predators aren’t a constraint, what is the constraint? I would think they should just increase population until we don’t have to cut our grass anymore.
In: Biology
rabbits breed a lot precisely because they die a lot and need to maintain population. If rabbits bred out of control, they would starve themselves out of their environment and then die out.
Fun fact: this mechanism is what let chickens become easily domesticated. Wild chicken populations would explode when food was plentiful and would shrink when food was scarce. Ancient humans figured out that if you kept giving them food, they would just keep producing offspring. It was the ultimate chicken engine.
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