Hi Twirl! Oh yes, entirely convinced. Exactly what I expected, in fact. When I speak of Gaian strategies of population re-balancing, this is precisely the sort of thing I’d predict to start popping up. I think that when I write ‘Gaian methods’ people always get instant images of mass super-pandemics and hyper-famines, with dead piling up in the street. Sometimes, it’s true, the Gaian way does lead to that with some species. But only locally, and in fairly small incidents.
I expect that the bulk of the natural reduction will come about far less dramatically, as I’ve often sketched, by the aggregate global birth-rate and death rate quietly switching places from where they’ve been for some centuries, with the birth rate maybe a couple of percentage points, or even less, ahead of the death rate. I expect these two indices to change places, again by the same small margin, and thus lead to a steady, unmistakable overall decline in human world population in the middle decades of this century - just as the remarkably accurate-so-far ‘Limits To Growth’ and ‘The Thirty Year Update’ have foreshadowed. But I imagine that this trend will be just as low-key and unobtrusive as the build up to the current overshoot has been.
It may be a significant straw in the wind that Dmitry Orlov, speaking from Russia where he now lives, points out that from the Russian viewpoint, their country is rather underpopulated, and the situation in Bangladesh, Japan, or Hong Kong, for example, is simply not the same. They have a serious local problem; other parts of the world not so much.
Responding to P’s point about unexpected side-effects of novel pathogens leading to much lowered fertility in humans: yes, another entirely expectable Gaian tactic; in exactly the same way that I’ve been expecting for some time to see novel microorganisms which can make a life by eating plastics; and whaddya know, exactly that has just been reported recently!
Expect that to extend. Gaia has an old, well-established way of taking a novel catastrophe - such as the plastic junk gyres in the oceans, or before that the sudden, apparently disastrous build up of oxygen in the ancient atmosphere many millions of years ago because of new, oxygen-excreting micro-organisms - and turning it into a solid advantage, by canny evolution of appropriate new life-forms that actually profit from the ‘disaster’, so that now we can’t do without it!
You may surmise that there are no, or very few, Chicken Little strains in my ancestry… 
