The second article mentions one of the odd side effects of all this: exposure in a quarry of wonderful Devonian tree fossils near Gilboa, New York, a town submerged in the filling of one of the larger reservoirs. This world-class fossil site has implications for theories of the late-Devonian mass extinction, one of the "big five" mass extinctions, where the colonization of land by large plants may have caused disruption of the global climate.
The plants were not able to have their equivalent of our current debate "Is is all right for our descendants to populate the planet even if it alters the global environment and climate" ? It's ironic that we are able to and that may only reduce our evolutionary fitness.
That doesn't seem to have anything to do with what I wrote. In particular, that animals can overpopulate would not make something of the scale of a "Big Five" mass extinction any less apocalyptic.
