Collapse of the Vulture Population in India Led to Over Half a Million Deaths

Vultures, often misunderstood and viewed with distaste, play a fascinating and critical role in our ecosystem – a fact impressively quantified by economists. In a new study by the American Economic Review, researchers show that the sudden, near-total disappearance of vultures in India about twenty years ago caused more than half a million excess human deaths within five years. Rotting animal carcasses, no longer stripped to the bone by vultures, polluted water sources and led to an increase in wild dogs, which can transmit diseases like rabies. Anant Sudarshan, Professor of Economics at the University of Warwick in England and co-author of the study, describes it as "an enormous negative shock to hygiene." The collapse of the vulture population vividly demonstrates the unintended consequences that can accompany the extinction of keystone species – animals that play a disproportionate role in their ecosystems. Economists are increasingly trying to measure such ecological impacts. A similar investigation in the United States suggested that the loss of ash trees due to the invasive emerald ash borer led to an increase in deaths from cardiovascular and respiratory diseases. In Wisconsin, researchers found that the presence of wolves reduced the number of deer-vehicle collisions by about a quarter, resulting in an economic benefit that exceeded the costs of wolf predation on livestock by 63 times. Eyal Frank, an economist at the University of Chicago and co-author of the new vulture study, emphasizes: "Biodiversity and the functioning of ecosystems are important to humans. And it's not always the charismatic and furry species.