Could Isla Sorna support its dinosaur inhabitants in the Jurassic Park movies?
With a size of about 150 square miles, would the island from the 2nd and 3rd movies have had the necessary vegetation to support its herbivorous dinosaurs for very long? Or for that matter, enough herbivores to support the carnivores who'd also need to eat regularly? From what I read, a single Brachiosaurus would eat 800 pounds of vegetation and a single Tyrannosaurus would eat several hundred pounds of meat a day.
Looking at the long-term, what about a growing population needing to be fed and the lack of genetic diversity in a colony?
Best Answer
What is the smallest size island to have a population of elephants in recent times? Actually many islands had populations of dwarf elephants due to island dwarfism. So the question should be what is the smallest island to have a population of regular sized non dwarf proboscideans?
Wrangel Island in the Arctic Ocean north of Siberia has an area of 7,600 square kilometers or 2,900 square miles. The population of Woolly Mammoths surviving there until about 2,000 BC was considered to be dwarf mammoths but have recently been considered to be non dwarf mammoths.
St. Paul's Island, Alaska has an area of 43 sq mi (110 km2). as sea levels rose, St. Paul's Island became separated from the mainland and shrank for thousands of years until it reached it's present size about 6,000 years ago. But mammoths continued to live on the island until about 5,600 years ago, plus or minus 100 years.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/08/160801163855.htm1
Thus it seems possible for herbivores the size of elephants to survive on islands the size of Isla Sorna and Isla Nublar for generations, centuries, or millennia. But one might have to multiply the size of the islands for dinosaur populations depending on how much those dinosaurs exceeded the body mass of elephants. And of course the tropical vegetaton on Isla Sorna and Isla Nublar might offer more nutrition per acre.
So I guess the answer is a big maybe.
06-26-2018 addition.
There was proably an island in what is now Transylvania, Harteg Island, with a population of dwarf dinosaurs. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ha%C8%9Beg_Island Since Harteg Island had an area of about 80,000 square kilometers, about the size of Hispaniola, but wasn't large enough for full sized dinosaurs, one might imagine that a significantly larger area would have been required for herds of large dinosaurs.
See also here:https://scifi.stackexchange.com/questions/190130/what-would-be-the-area-size-of-land-required-for-dinosaurs-to-survive-and-flouri2
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Are there still dinosaurs on Isla Sorna?
In 2004, in an effort to save the island's inhabitants from extinction, Simon Masrani had Isla Sorna's surviving dinosaurs shipped to Isla Nublar, where they would eventually be exhibited alongside recently cloned animals in Jurassic World. As of 2018, Isla Sorna is reportedly abandoned, though it remains restricted.Did any dinosaurs survive Isla Nublar?
Isla Nublar was totally wiped out during the events of Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. A great many of the dinosaurs that were still alive on the island died in epic and tragic fashion.Is Isla Sorna bigger than Isla Nublar?
"Isla Sorna" roughly means "Sarcasm Island" in Spanish. The research station of InGen, where the dinosaurs were created, was located on this island. It is the place where most of the movies, books and games about Jurassic Park take place. The island is much larger than Isla Nublar.La MISSIONE SEGRETA della INGEN su ISLA SORNA - Test Amalgam [Jurassic Park Lore]
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