I think I get what is going on here. I was not talking about any kind of balance, since that does not exist. In nature, you have dynamic equilibrium, which is to say that conditions fluctuate around some sort of midpoint (the midpoint itself probably never exists, except in some fleeting form while the system changes from one state to another).
What I was talking about is the predator/prey cycle. A cycle is not balance. There is no magical balance where there are exactly n individuals of species y... nature fluctuates. I will say that I was as dumbfounded when you tried to tell me that the paradigm of predator/prey interdependency has been debunked as I would have been had you tried to tell me that the concept that gas exchange at the alveolar/air interface in the lungs has been debunked. There are certain scientific observations that have been made so many times, by so many people, using so many methods, that people don't even conceive of questioning them any more. The predator/prey relationship is one of those.
Out of curiosity, I looked up the Isle Royale situation. It is not an experiment, since humans did not perturb the system in any way (except to capture animals to measure them and place radio collars). Technically speaking, it is a long term observational study. Contrary to your assertion that it debunks anything I have said, my hypotheses about the situation were confirmed when I read the details of the study. When you mentioned an unusually high number of moose, and an unsustainably low number of wolves, my immediate thought was that some other factor--disease or inbreeding--has decimated the wolves, since there obviously is an adequate food supply. As it turns out, both processes have been going on to suppress the wolf population. A high number of wolves were killed by parvovirus, and the population was so small that inbreeding was severely impacting its genetic diversity (and, hence, its fertility rate). Contrary to debunking the paradigm that predators increase in number until they deplete the prey population, at which point they die off and the prey population rebounds, at which point the predators are able to thrive again, etc., ad infinitum, it highlights the principle that if a well-established paradigm seems not to be operant in a specific system, some other process is going on that perturbs the system. Or, to put it another way, if what you observe is not what you expect, you have to investigate to find out why.
The paradigm is very simple, really. Animals thrive when food supply is plentiful. Animals die when food is scarce. One of the most common reasons for food scarcity is that there are too many consumers of that food. You have seen an example of that if you have ever driven past a cow pasture where the cows have eaten every single piece of plant material and there is nothing but bare dirt left--you know those cows would starve if the farmer were not feeding them.
That is why some tribes in BC are airlifting out pregnant caribou to a place where they can safely give birth away from wolves. According to your theory the predators should now decline, but in truth many caribou and elk herds in the west are beyond recovery because of predation from wolves.
That statement is actually an acknowledgement that the predator/prey cycle is a real factor in population dynamics. I do not know what "beyond recovery" means, because prey populations always rebound when the predator population crashes. If there are so many wolves that they have eaten a large proportion of those herds, then the wolves actually have little to eat and many of them will not survive. That is, unless wolves are supernatural beings that actually do not need to eat to survive--in which case, we all need to wonder what is going on and maybe get worried about it. If the prey populations are having difficulty rebounding, it is not because of the wolves--since these populations have cycled interdependently for eons--it is because of human encroachment on habitats.
There have been quite a few studies done that show there is no equilibrium...It is not your checkbook, it is nature and it doesn't check and balance itself, no matter how badly you wish it would.
Equilibrium is not balance. Balance implies a static situation, which does not exist in nature. Equilibrium is dynamic and responsive to many forces.
And I can assure you that the predator/prey paradigm has not been "debunked", nor is it likely that it ever will become debunked. As I already pointed out, one of the top two scientific journals in the world produced an educational article on it only 5 years ago. And the paradigm is still under intense study, as evidenced by the fact that articles are still being published: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=predation+and+prey
After reading this thread, I conclude that this is a picture of an emaciated syrian “refuge” who has a poor sense of direction.