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[Bob69Joe]

If at generating a world you press 'p,' you get a text file with the pops and sites of the world. It lists hundreds of thousands of herbivores and tens of thousands of carnivores. So, is there really an ecosystem going on? The meat eaters reduce pops of the spinach eaters and everything annualy or whenever does its "business." I remeber that merperson genocide rig to harvest their pearly bones. Would that have actually been enough to eventually deplete the world of merpeople, considering they all stupidly migrated from the entire ocean to that fort to get stuck in a dehydration chamber?

[PatrikLundell]

Yes and no...

The mechanics are simplistic, but sort of a simulation. There's no explicit predator eats prey action in there, but it's all abstracted. It's said to be reasonably easy to wipe out all yetis in a biome, for instance, because there's a small number of them to begin with, and there aren't that many species living it that biome (meaning there's a relative large chance a critter "group" entering will be one of the few yetis). Numbers are kept for the number of creatures of each species in each biome, but I don't know if there's any birth/death fluctuation or it just assumes the births balance deaths exactly, and I don't think there's any rebalancing so that hard culling would be countered eventually by a gradual pop increase towards a goal number (but that's all guesswork anyway).
Thus, wiping out all predators will not affect the number of herbivores in that biome (but all critters entering the fortress will be herbivores, and the player may obviously mess with those as well).