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Description: One of the best-studied cases of animal population cycles is that of the snowshoe hare, Lepus americanus, and the lynx, Lynx canadensis, one of the snowshoe hare's chief predators (fig. 14.10). The population cycles of these two species are especially well documented because the Hudson Bay Company kept trapping records during most of the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries. Drawing on this unique historical record ecologists were able to estimate the relative abundances of Canada lynx and snowshoe hare over a period of about 200 years. That record, shown in figure 14.11, demonstrates a remarkable match in the cycles of the two populations.
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