I enjoy watching adorable wildlife baby videos (e.g., this video by George Bumann & Jenny Golding, of black bear cubs playing in Yellowstone).
I began wondering whether these wild babies, through their activities, significantly participate in the modification of habitats.
Normally, I should attempt to discriminate between play and exploration but often these two activities are impossible to disentangle.
For example, in the video, it can be seen that the bear cubs are breaking dead branches off dead trees and also loosening the bark thus participating in the turnover of wood detritus, providing forage and microhabitats for wood-decay-related species.
Through scraping the bark of living trees (during their climbing activities), bear cubs might facilitate infection of trees by fungi and other organisms that, in time, become shelter and foraging sites for many other species.
Some trees are probably broken as the thinner, younger trees or drier, half-dead trees snap under the weight of the cub.
Bear cubs are larger species that are heavy, that have claws and that can thereby introduce their improvements into the habitats through their size alone.
However, many other species are smaller but they might be more restricted to a certain core area during their growth (because they grow up in territorial, central place foraging settings and are perhaps less mobile).
Their impact could be pronounced through frequent use and the duration of use.
While wolf pups are not ‘very small’, it has been mentioned that they tend to trample rather vast areas of grass in the rendevouz sites.
Thus, they affect the vegetation structure in these sites and, in turn, the associated species and soil processes.
Some impacts by babies could be indirect – carried out through changes in the behaviour of adults.
For example, if I am not mistaken, beavers are likelier to create winter food piles if there are kits in their colony because kits are more vulnerable to adverse weather (kit survival is affected by cold winter conditions while adult survival is not necessarily dependent on winter climate), and kits are in greater need to access food safely during the cold winter months.
Stacked branches significantly alter the carbon content, overall nutrient content, chemistry and hydrology of the riparian system as well as provide microhabitats for overwintering organisms.
If kits induce more active food piling behaviour in adults, kits would be ‘responsible’ for the effects of these ‘pantries’.
However, the latter example does not concern play, nor exploration, nor, truly, any activity by the kits themselves.
Regarding beavers, I have observed that they practice swimming after they have left the den and as they do not retreat far from the den site, the swimming activity might affect some daily rhythms by other species (through creating turbulent, opaque underwater habitat).
I believe it would make for an interesting and adorable research to follow the effects of playing wild babies on their habitats.
I can imagine that the ruckus itself might change behaviour in neighbouring species which might adjust their own habitat use.
As cubs, kits, pups etc. play, they reorganize and disassemble the natural objects and they might also modify them in ways that mere impact of weathering does not (e.g., creating new cavities, placing objects in odd locations where they would not be ‘naturally’ available etc.).
Part of play involves foraging practice and thus it would be curious to analyze whether typical (traditional) den sites or playgrounds tend have different species composition both regarding plant-based forage and living prey (e.g., whether some rodent species tend to avoid creating their burrows close to sites that are likely den sites for rodent-catching small, medium or large predators).
These activities might also ‘work the litter’ into ground or loosen the topsoil levels inducing changes into soil chemistry and aggregate structure.
There are many possible pathways and many possible results and I hope such research shows up.
Notes by Ieva 