Just as nothing quite says sexy like a 300-kilogram bull elk rolling in dust and urinating all over its neck to produce a sweet, sweet musk that brings all the ladies to the yard.

Wait, what?

It’s time to meet the elk: a critical landscape architect of the Rocky Mountain ecosystem, even if their love life leaves a little something to be desired.

All members of the deer family are, in a sense, ecosystem designers, each with a particular niche – caribou take the high alpine, bighorn the subalpine, moose the wetland ecosystems and deer the more heavily forested landscape.

But guess who’s best at maintaining the soil and plant chemistry of the biodiversity-rich valley bottoms? That’s right: team elk.

They’re basically living, breathing lawnmowers.

Which might sound disrespectful until you realize the importance of herbivore optimization – can’t we just call it animal lawn mower-ing?

Why’s it important? Take your backyard, should you be fortunate enough, like some elk, to have one.

When you don’t mow, plants grow like crazy, which aside from earning you scorn from those over 50, also means that, with time, weeds will choke the grass to death. And who likes dead grass?

But a nice steady mow job makes sure that everything gets turned over and new life gets a chance to sprout. Which is important to people who like lawns, like ESPN’s Buster Onley, and important to all life in an ecosystem such as this.

When elk are absent – and they have been removed from the majority of their original range – plant diversity is greater. Which means more food for elk, but also more food for many other species. Like bees! And we love ourselves some bees.

Here’s the thing though – and you knew this was coming – if there are too many elk, nature – which can be so precious at times – revolts.

Just like when a neighbour gets obsessive compulsive about their lawn and mows it every day, there isn’t enough time for new life to take seed. Nothing grows, diversity is lost and you basically end up with dirt.

Dirt, of course, isn’t that superpower soil – it’s just a dusty wasteland. And, also, no one likes a wasteland.

To prevent elk from turning this into this, they get a little help from their friends.

Friends? Well, frenemies might be more accurate.

It’s why this process helps this and this, but also this. You see, when the regulators keep the elk population at just the right levels, their decaying bodies – what’s called carrion – doesn’t just feed other life, it also helps soil breathe and provides the nitrogen for vegetation to grow.

So every bit of a dead elk matters to, well, elk – which is awkward, but don’t tell them. They’re just happy laying around, using their four-part super-stomachs to digest, store and then regurgitate food for a second helping – called cud – before re-digesting their delicious plant-based world.

I mean, who hasn’t said that salad was so good, let me eat it again!