Why are Gray Wolves important and thriving in Minnesota?

The Voyageurs Wolf Project was set up to understand the ecology of resident wolf packs in northern Minnesota. Using state of the art technology and intensive field-effort, their work has revealed fascinating insights into the private lives of these top predators. The project helps answer the question, why are Gray Wolves important? It also provides some compelling insights into animal impactWhat is Animal Impact? Without wildlife, Earth would not be habitable for humans, because it's animals that stabilise ecosystems. It’s a fundamental law of nature that animals (and humans) exist because we are the most likely lifeforms to minimise environmental chaos. Animal impact, therefore, is a measure of how much all wildlife is collectively responsible for creating a habitable Earth. The More.

This was the graphic that first grabbed my attention.

The impact of top predators like Gray Wolves

Scientists love to debate the significance of animals in ecosystems. The idea that a top-predator can create a cascade of influence is hotly contested by some. However, when you try to do research in broken and fragmented landscapes without animals, the results aren’t natural. There are few places left in the world, where the impact of animals can still be seen clearly.

Northern Minnesota is the state’s only place where Gray Wolves have always existed forever. So, scientists can study the behaviour of animals that have retained tens of thousands of years of cultural connection with their environment.

Territorial armies of animals

Wolves form distinct territories, as shown in the animated graphic (above). While scuffles happen at the boundaries, this is most often posturing. Fighting is dangerous and leaves a pack vulnerable to disease and injury. And because winters are harsh, unless you’re in peak fitness, it’s unlikely you’ll make it through.

Wolves instead leave sensory clues like scent-marking and howl, as a way to maintain order. Birds sing. In natural conditions, fighting and competition by animals is only marginal.

All animals have distinct territorial boundaries and given enough time, the most successful will fill a landscape. For example, before koalas were exterminated for the fur trade, there were enough to occupy almost all the forests of eastern Australia. Their influence on ecosystem processes was enormous.

Every animal exerts a similar impact at different scales, while they actively modifying and rebuild their surrounds. For the Minnesota wolves, they do this over 78 square kilometres. Caterpillars do it on single plants.

Ever decreasing circles with increasing influence

Imagine a series of circles, the biggest being territories of top predators and within those, other smaller circles representing other species’ territories. These don’t have to be animals that eat each other. The relationships are more complex than that. It can be that one animal simply creates a new dynamic.

There are more circles inside those smaller circles and so on, until eventually you reach the microscopic level. Even Bacteria and viruses create their own ecosystems with tiny food chains operating on the same principles as wolves and beavers.

The following figures from the Voyageurs Wolf Project show the number of wolf territories and beaver lodges. There are approximately 75 wolves per beaver, which form a significant part of a wolf’s diet. A while ago I wrote about a study on European Wolves and Wild Boar, that showed how a ratio of about 35 boar to one wolf, would almost wipe out tuberculosis. Disease is a natural process but only gets out of control when these wildlife populations are out of balance.

You can imagine drawing circles of interlocking beaver territories around the stars in the above map. As so-called ‘ecosystem engineers’, they create more niches of habitat for other species such as wild salmon and trout, which in turn modify the environment for freshwater invertebrates and so on.

Pattern forming and routines

If you’re a common microbe, your patches will be tiny and you could survive quite readily in degraded habitat. You don’t need to move far to find food. But larger animals like us depend on the structure and function(Of an ecosystem). A subset of ecosystem processes and structures, where the ecosystem does something that provides an ecosystem service of value to people. More of ecosystems at bigger scales. And for that, we need wolves and other large creatures to concentrate resources for us – to selectively prune the systems so they flourish more strongly.

Individual wolf tracks show us how animals build these cultivation routines. Den locations are based on what the landscape offers but animals with a strong cultural knowledge, passed down over generations, will forage in roughly the same places time and time again. They know this is where they have the greatest chance to find food.

Fairly precise patterns develop with a degree of flexibility and only vary slowly over time, as ecosystems develop. Remember, the animals are constantly altering surrounds to suit them, so apart from extreme weather events, these changes are mostly mutual.

That translates into culture. The ability of any animal to survive, means it having access to knowledge about predictable resources and it’s built into the way they communicate. We have the same need to find food, even though we visit supermarkets. Our culture is one of signposts, TV adverts and car parks.

After ecosystems degrade, it forces animals to move further and this creates competition. The culture disintegrates and fighting occurs at the boundaries. Compare the figure below, from Treswell Wood IPM Group (UK) of Song Thrush territories in 2016, to the figure earlier from 1976. Not only have the territories declined in number but they are now bigger and there are gaps between them.

Cultural disintegration causes biodiversity collapse

For a hunter-gatherer like us, everything from food security to stable climate and clean water, depends on having animals in the right proportion of abundance. Our culture is disintegrating as the certainty of our climate and food systems declines around us. This is because we’ve allowed ecosystems to malfunction by killing wildlife.

In the song thrush example above, you can literally see this decline in action. The gaps in between the birds’ territories are no longer subject to the processes of amplificationAmplification (of nutrients and energy). Animals consume plants and other animals and in doing so, reintroduce important energy-containing nutrients back into the environment, at even higher concentrations and in patches. Amplification of energy is driven by migration and happens at every scale, from insects moving daily in and out of your vegetable patch, to African wildebeest herds and the seasonal More, concentration and transfer(of nutrients) the thing that sets animals apart from plants, is that they can move. Some of the biggest migrations on Earth every day, are the movement of insects like caterpillars, from the stem of a plant to a leaf and back, before turning into butterflies and transferring the energy elsewhere. Large-scale migration of grazing animals and migratory songbirds moves More of nutrientsEnergy and nutrients are the same thing. Plants capture energy from the Sun and store it in chemicals, via the process of photosynthesis. The excess greenery and waste that plants create, contain chemicals that animals can eat, in order to build their own bodies and reproduce. When a chemical is used this way, we call it a nutrient. As we More that happened before.

This is why animals are the only hope to restoring ecosystems and helps answers the question, why are Gray Wolves important? Top predators exert their influence on ecosystems at a fairly big scale, just like we do. We need animals like wolves, animals to us, as a key part of the solution to our world problems.

Support the Voyageurs Wolf Project

Donations are one of the best ways to help and support the Voyageurs Wolf Project. We always have costs that we are trying to cover to continue our research (see examples below). Any donation helps us to that end and all donations go directly to funding the project. 

References

1. Alakoski, R., Kauhala, K. & Selonen, V. Differences in habitat use between the native Eurasian beaver and the invasive North American beaver in Finland. Biol Invasions 21, 1601–1613 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10530-019-01919-9