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Jorgelina Marino
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News of the Week Conservation Biology: Research Wolves of Yellowstone Killed in Hunt Virginia Morell
On 3 October, a few weeks after Montana opened its first legal wolf-hunting season in decades, a hunter killed a female wolf in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, less than a mile from the border of Yellowstone National Park. She wasn't the first Northern Rocky Mountain gray wolf to be legally hunted since wolves were removed from the federal endangered species list last May. But she was the alpha female of Yellowstone Park's Cottonwood Pack and wore a large radio collar identifying her as wolf 527F. Her behavior, travels, life history, and genealogy had been studied in detail by scientists for 5 of her 7 years. Her death, and that of five other pack members also shot outside Yellowstone, including another radio-collared female, have irrevocably changed what had been a unique long-term study, the researchers say. "We were studying one of the very few unexploited wolf populations in North America," where packs had lived and died naturally, says wildlife biologist Douglas Smith, leader of Yellowstone's wolf project, which has tracked the wolves since their reintroduction in 1995. "We can no longer make that claim." The park's wolf project, partially funded by a $480,000, 5-year National Science Foundation grant, isn't the only scientific study adversely affected. The death of the wolves and loss of the pack are also a blow to a host of studies, from wolf behavior to elk management and ecology, say other scientists, several of whom have repeatedly asked Montana's Fish, Wildlife and Parks (FWP) department to establish a no-wolf-hunting zone around the park (Science, 15 February 2008, p. 890). "Yellowstone is one of the best examples in the world of what happens naturally to an ecosystem when an apex predator is returned," says ecologist William Ripple of Oregon State University, Corvallis, who has shown that wolves are helping to rebalance the park's ecosystem (Science, 27 July 2007, p. 438). "If the park wolves are being shot at, they're bound to change their behavior." A possible buffer zone and other suggestions will be considered as they review this season's hunt, say FWP officials, who add that the hunt that killed 527F had not worked out as expected. In only 4 weeks, hunters had killed nine wolves in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, including 527F, nearly filling the quota of 12 wolves for this area's early season hunt. As a result, the agency last week closed the wilderness to wolf hunting for the remainder of the season, which ends when snow keeps hunters out. "We didn't think that wolves would be that vulnerable in the backcountry, so the level of harvest there has been a bit of a surprise," says Carolyn Sime, FWP's wolf program coordinator in Helena, who added that the hunt was designed to target wolves that kill livestock, not wilderness or park wolves that have never caused problems in that area. However, many hunting camps are set up in the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness to take advantage of elk migrating out of Yellowstone, conservationists point out. Also, park wolves are naïve. "Every person the park wolves encountered was benign until now," says Smith. Inside the park, wolves are regarded as study animals and tourist magnets, pulling in a minimum of $35 million a year in tourist dollars, according to a 2006 University of Montana study. But as soon as a wolf crosses into Montana, it falls under state law, which regards the canids as "a species in need of management"—another big game animal that can be hunted like the deer, elk, bear, and mountain lion that also travel in and out of the park. Five of Yellowstone's remaining 12 packs have territories that stray outside park borders. Some wildlife officials point out that the Cottonwood Pack may not be completely gone. The killing of most of its members has not greatly harmed Yellowstone's wolves or scientists' research, they argue, because there are more than 100 wolves left in the park and one wolf pack is very like another. "Biologically, [the loss] has no impact, since wolf packs turn over all the time," says Edward Bangs, wolf recovery coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Helena. "It doesn't make any difference to wolf conservation or wolf research, although it will cost Doug [Smith] more money to collar another wolf." But from Smith's perspective the Cottonwood Pack is gone, and he will need to collar two more wolves—a dangerous, time-consuming task, costing $1500 per wolf—to successfully track whatever pack moves into the Cottonwood's former territory, which was 95% inside park boundaries. In addition, much of the data gathered on 527F and her pack are now worthless because the wolves met an unnatural end and no longer fit the project's study criteria, he says. The project is now adding a new category to many of its 85 databases: harvested wolf. A secretive wolf, whose territory this year was so remote that researchers seldom saw her, 527F was raising her third litter. (The fate of her five 5-month-old pups is not known.) At the advanced age of 7, she was a key animal in many studies, including some on how long wolves live, their maximum body size, and female wolves' lifetime reproductive success. These are some of the many unknowns of wolf biology that "can't be studied outside Yellowstone because people curtail wolves' maximum life spans," explains Smith. Smith collars the wolves, but many scientists independent of the wolf project have been gathering data on the radio-collared wolves. "Any time radio-collared animals are lost, it's a huge setback for our research, since it's the best tool for tracking their movements," says Daniel McNulty, an ecologist at Michigan Technical University in Houghton, who has been studying wolf-prey dynamics in Yellowstone. He worries that annual hunting of Yellowstone's wolves will eventually affect their social dynamics and age structure, "skewing it toward the younger classes, something that has been demonstrated in every game population" worldwide. That, in turn, could potentially be bad news for the park's elk, because McNulty's research has shown that younger wolves kill more elk. Evolutionary geneticist Robert Wayne of the University of California, Los Angeles, adds that an annual hunt, as is now planned for the Absaroka-Beartooth Wilderness, runs the risk of turning the area into "a predator sink, drawing wolves out of Yellowstone," as young, dispersing animals search for unoccupied territories. "This shouldn't have happened," he says. "Yellowstone's wolves should have absolute protection." But they don't, and Montana's FWP has a quota of three additional wolves in other areas adjacent to Yellowstone. Montana's statewide wolf-hunting season opens on 25 October. |
