The park and the forests surrounding it have more than 7000 beaver ponds. The Voyageurs wolves offer up a third possibility. One is through fear and intimidation, like in the Yellowstone story. In that regard, wolves are connected to all the ecological processes that are associated with wetlands and beaver ponds."Įcologists have long assumed the predators can influence their ecosystems in two main ways. GABLE: "Because they prevent beavers from converting a forest into a wetland. When a wolf kills one, it can have a big impact. If a young beaver gets killed after leaving home, it will never have a chance to build a new dam.Įven if it had started construction before becoming a wolf's lunch, the dam will remain unfinished and fall into disrepair.īeavers are ecosystem engineers. GABLE: "Wolves, by preying on dispersing beavers, alter where wetlands are created. Which brings us back to the boreal forests of northern Minnesota, and the ground that Tom Gable and his team have been crawling over the last few years.ĭuring the winter, wolves work together to kill large prey like deer.īut Gable found that in warmer, ice-free months, wolves focus on smaller prey, like newborn deer fawns – and especially beavers.Īnd that’s where things get really interesting for the ecosystem. New findings cast some doubt on the idea that wolves primarily regulate the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem through fear and intimidation.Īnd regardless of the situation there, very little research has been conducted on this question in ecosystems that don't resemble the mountains and grasslands of Yellowstone. If that is true, it's really incredible." GABLE: "Regardless of your inclination, it's hard not to be like, wow this is amazing. Which led to a rise in fox, rabbit, and ground-nesting bird numbers.Įcologists call this row of biological dominoes a trophic cascade. Wolves outcompete coyotes for access to prey, so coyotes populations plummeted. It also meant more river-side berries for foraging grizzly bears.Īnd it led to alterations in the flow of those streams, sending water in new directions. That gave willows, cottonwoods, and aspens a better chance to grow near streams.
The story goes something like this: as the elk grew to fear the wolves, they changed where and how they foraged. The long-term study is, in a way, a quest to broaden a science story that goes back 25 years.įor wildlife ecologists, the story of the reintroduction of wolves to the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem on January 12, 1995, has become canonical.
Those collars led Gable and his team to kill sites.Īnd there, amid the leaf litter, were bloodied bits of fur and bone … clues about how wolves alter the ecosystems they live, and hunt, and kill in. Since 2015, the University of Minnesota conservation biologist has used GPS collars to track 30 wolves inside Voyageurs National Park. GABLE: It's very much like a crime scene investigation…. In fact, he’s tracking a whole pack of them. GABLE: "We literally get down on our hands and knees and start slowly sifting through the leaf litter, looking through bits of hair or a little chunk of bone… This is 60-second science, I'm Jason Goldman.