| Title | By Learning to Hunt Otters, Wolves Decimate (Annihilate) a Deer Population | |
| Date | Saturday January 28 2023, @03:05PM | |
| Author | janrinok | |
| Topic | ||
| from the juicy-sweet dept. | ||
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.
[...]
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.
[...]
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.
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printed from SoylentNews, By Learning to Hunt Otters, Wolves Decimate (Annihilate) a Deer Population on 2024-04-19 02:28:40