Isle Royal is an island, a rather remote island in the middle of Lake Superior,
the biggest freshwater lake in the world,
Zand on this island our population of
wolves and moose,
and these wolves and moose interact with one another as
predator and prey.
The wolves eating the moose and the mooses primary cause
of death being the wolves.
They've been there for about 50 years
together interacting in this way and for about the same amount of time. For 50
years, researchers from Michigan Tech University have been studying those
interactions.
The longer we study things on Isle Royale the more and more we
realize that our original understandings, they weren't very good.
In fact they're
just plain old wrong, and the only way to get that is by continuing to watch, to
see that as it unfolds it's a bit different than what you had previously
thought. For many many decades we thought Isle Royale wolves were isolated, inbred
and showed no signs of no bad signs of that inbreeding. You couldn't be
more wrong than to find out: "Well they're not so isolated and they also suffer
from this inbreeding." In a normal wolf population, about one and a hundred
wolves would have some spinal type of deformity. On Isle Royale it's about 1 in
3 wolves. So, 30 times higher rate of deformities. The other related thing is
we thought for many many decades that the wolves on Isle Royale were
completely isolated. Well, we just recently this year found out that's not
quite so true either. For about the last 13 years, we've been collecting the scats
of wolves. From those scats we can get DNA, and from the DNA we can get DNA
fingerprints and more or less identify one wolf from another, and figure out who
the brothers and sisters are, and other family relationships, males and females
all that stuff we can get from these DNA. Well, what we discovered just in the past
year is something that happened more than 13 years ago. In the year 1997, a
wolf from Canada had come to Isle Royale. We knew about the identity of this wolf
for a long time, we just never knew his heritage. We knew about him because he
was really quite a spectacular wolf he was physically larger than all the other
wolves on Isle Royale, he was the leader of middle pack which became one
of the largest packs Isle Royale had ever seen under his leadership. His parents'
superiority is one of the most strong signs you could ask for that the wolves
on Isle Royale had in fact been suffering from inbreeding depression that they
weren't doing so well, because relatively speaking he would he was that much
better. Isle Royale has been showing us the two things that is best at showing
us, one is it shows us how easy it is for ecologists to to get it wrong, how easy
it is for ecologists to misunderstand how nature actually works. The other
thing that Isle Royale is good at showing us is how it is that we need to
think deeply about our relationship with nature in general and how that comes
into play has to do with in the last three or four years the wolves on Isle
Royale have been doing relatively poor, they've had quite a difficult time of it.
Basically if we go back to just a couple of years ago, say early 2009, there
were four packs on Isle Royal and about 30 wolves on the island. In just those
couple of years we're down to now about 15 adult wolves and only one pack. It's
been four decades since Isle Royale has been reduced to just a single pack.
So this is very unusual time right now. At the moment, it's just the Moose are a bit low in
abundance, if the moose are low there's not so much food for the Wolves. Begs the
question why are the moose low? Well one of the important reasons why the moose
are low it has to do with climate change. The last 10 years have been fairly
warm, and in warm climate is bad for moose in a couple of different ways. They
just don't do well in the summer heat. When it's hot they don't eat as
much and when they don't eat as much they're not getting ready for winter and
then winter they're not ready to make it through the
whole winter. There's also a tick that bothers the Moose and that tick can have
catastrophic effects on the moves it can cause them to die
in the winter time. But it turns out those ticks are really do quite well
when it's warm out. The last kind of critical detail about the Wolves right
now is that there are at most two adult females on the island, and if those two
adult females, if they die before making more pups that are females that would be
the end of the wolf population. What it begs is it begs the question what would
happen if those wolves go extinct? And the question is you know would it be
right to reintroduce more wolves. The federally designated wilderness is these
are these places in our country where we are most proud about humans not
intervening, and humans not having an impact and so the usual management for a
place like this is not intervention, and here comes some of the complexities: if
wolves are doing poorly because the moose are doing poorly, and if moose are
doing poorly because of climate change and if humans are the agents behind
climate change, isn't that an occasion to maybe think about what's about
intervening in the last 50 years, so the Lake Superior has gotten progressively warmer and ice bridges
don't form nearly as often now as they did before, and so the chances of wolves
coming back on their own are quite slim for that reason. The Isle Royale is really just
an example of what's kind of a big important question for wilderness all
across the United States, which is basically there really isn't not one
square inch in our country that humans haven't heavily impacted including our
wilderness areas. These human impacts are probably just an occasion for us to kind
of rethink what is our relationship with nature? What is our relationship with
wilderness areas in particular, and Isle Royal and this question of what to do if
wolves go extinct is going to play an important role in kind of leading our
thoughts to that new stage. Wide-open questions they require broad dialogue
with the relevant federal agencies, but it's important for
all citizens that are that have a stake with nature which is all
citizens so it's just a question for all of us really.