The ten-year cycle in numbers of the lynx in Canada

A classic of population ecology, this paper assembled Hudson's Bay Company fur-return records spanning two centuries to document the now-iconic roughly ten-year oscillation in Canada lynx numbers. Elton and Nicholson analyzed the long time series region by region, establishing the regularity, synchrony and amplitude of the cycle and tying it to the parallel fluctuations of the snowshoe hare. Their work transformed an anecdotal trapper observation into a quantitative dataset that became the textbook example of predator-prey cycling and a benchmark for testing population models. Generations of ecologists have used these lynx records to develop and challenge theories of density dependence, delayed feedback and trophic coupling.