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Science 23 October 2009:
Vol. 326. no. 5952, pp. 506 - 507
DOI: 10.1126/science.326_506

News of the Week

Conservation Biology:

Research Wolves of Yellowstone Killed in Hunt

Virginia Morell

 <http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/326/5952/506/F1> Figure 1

Fair game? Wolf 527F (above) was shot by a hunter, which affects researcher
Doug Smith's studies.

CREDITS (LEFT TO RIGHT): WILLIAM CAMPBELL/U.S. FISH AND WILDLIFE SERVICE;
NATIONAL PARK SERVICE

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.
<http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;319/5865/890> 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.  <http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/sci;317/5837/438b> 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.

Jorgelina Marino, DPhil
WildCRU, University of Oxford
Tubney House, Tubney, OX13 5QL, United Kingdom
Ph: 01865 393110/100
jorgelina.mar...@zoo.ox.ac.uk
www.wildcru.org <http://www.wildcru.org/>