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On an Alaskan island, wolves adapted to hunt an unexpected aquatic prey:
People love otters, wolves, and deer. Respectively, they're crafty, intelligent, and majestic. Put them all together on an island, though, and things get unpleasant pretty quickly. These are the findings of a new paper analyzing how a wolf population came to Pleasant Island in Alaska, learned to hunt otters, and, using this unexpected food source, thrived to the point of wiping out the native Sitka black-tailed deer population.
"To the best of our knowledge, the deer population is decimated. We haven't found evidence of deer recolonizing the islands," Gretchen Roffler, wildlife research biologist for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and an author of the paper, told Ars.
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The team studied the wolves on the island by testing DNA found in 689 wolf scats and performing stable isotope analysis on hair and muscle material, which they got from local hunters. The team tracked the wolves between 2015 and 2021.
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From the samples, the researchers saw a diet that consisted primarily of deer shift to one that was made up primarily of sea otters. The research also found that the added and unexpected food source allowed the wolves to reproduce even after the deer population shrank. Ultimately, the wolves killed off the deer population on the island.
In all, though, the deer are the biggest losers in this equation. The wolves appear to still be on the island, and, Roffler said, none of them appear to have died from starvation—though the team intends to keep an eye on them. Considering the sea otters can swim to other parts of the coastal waters, they're also doing fine.
The big takeaway is that wolves can exploit a diversity of prey and learn to do so very quickly—like learning to hunt and kill sea otters in a matter of years. It also suggests that species restoration can bring some surprising sources of nutrients into an ecosystem. Finally, the work "really just confirms something that we already knew, which is that wolves are incredibly adaptable," she said.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by tangomargarine on Monday January 30 2023, @05:36AM (3 children)
We could however just stop doing that.
I'm so tired of descriptivists saying "well meaning wanders over time therefore WORDS DON'T MEAN ANYTHING IT'S ALL CHAOS!!"
The whole point of language is to understand each other! Meaning can be fudged somewhat, but come on. Over half the population of young people using a word wrong doesn't instantly invalidate that word; that's just dumb. Because of that, we have to sacrifice "literally" so that we just don't have any antonym to "figuratively"?
(Yes, I'm slightly defensive about this because of idiots online thinking "prescriptivism is a disproved theory": they're two ways of looking at the problem; neither of them is provably *wrong*)
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 4, Informative) by Reziac on Monday January 30 2023, @05:50AM
Actually, I completely agree with you. English may hoover up every word it ever sees, but each word still has meaning, or should have. Otherwise it degrades into amorphous mush.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.
(Score: 2) by Freeman on Monday January 30 2023, @02:47PM (1 child)
The original title did not include the word "Annihilate". We added that word in parentheses due to the entire argument you're making and the incorrect usage of decimate. As they believe the entire population of deer was wiped out.
Joshua 1:9 "Be strong and of a good courage; be not afraid, neither be thou dismayed: for the Lord thy God is with thee"
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Reziac on Thursday February 02 2023, @12:16AM
No worries... I found the juxtaposition of "decimate" and "annihilate" rather funny.
And there is no Alkibiades to come back and save us from ourselves.