Can't save Isle Roy wolves

[Lee Borgersen]

          Researchers: Too late to save current Isle Royale wolves

 Today at 7:00 a.m.

  ....

The longest running predator-prey study in the world revealed Tuesday that "the time has passed" to save the nearly extinct wolves on Isle Royale by introducing a process called genetic rescue.

Only two wolves remain on the Lake Superior island, said Michigan Technological University scientists Rolf Peterson and John Vucetich in their report, and the idea of introducing new breeding wolves "represents a misunderstanding of the underlying genetic processes," they said in a news release about what has been a 58-year study of the wolves and moose on the island.

Although Peterson and Vucetich had previously been among the most ardent supporters of genetic rescue, they counted three wolves in last year's study.

"Last year there was every reason to believe wolves were destined for extinction and moose are destined to grow rapidly in the near future," Vucetich said in the news release. "This year, we did not observe anything to make us think that circumstance has changed."

The population crash on Isle Royale is the result of inbreeding, said the MTU news release, and the two remaining wolves are definitely family — they are half-siblings and also a father-daughter pair.

The wolves on Isle Royale will be 6 and 8 years old this spring, while the life expectancy of wolves on the island has been about 4 years of age.

The scientists estimated 1,300 moose on the 45-mile-long, 143,000-acre island located about 18 miles off Minnesota's North Shore and the Canadian border.

Isle Royale National Park officials in 2014 started an environmental review process on what, if anything, to do about the matter. They plan to announce their decision in winter 2017.

In March, the News Tribune reported that the National Park Service, at the urging of some, including members of Congress, was narrowing its scope of the review in order to expedite the question of whether to bring wolves to Isle Royale in the near term.

While the MTU scientists said it is too late to genetically rescue the current wolf population, they did acknowledge that others argue wolf reintroduction could limit possible ecological damage being done by the burgeoning moose population.

But in the news release Peterson warned that waiting too long could lead to damage that cannot be undone.

Prior to these latest findings, there had been scientific debate about whether it would be better to allow the last two island wolves to die before restocking — ridding the island of genetic defaults — or to restock immediately to keep some of the original bloodlines intact.

There were 24 wolves on the island as recently as 2009.

Researchers say it is too late to undertake a genetic rescue of Isle Royale's wolf population.


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[Lee Borgersen]

When two is the loneliest number: Isle Royale wolf population drops again.


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 Listen to the audio report here:
http://www.mprnews.org/story/2016/04/19/isle-royale-wolf-population-down-to-two

[greatoutdoors]

The environmentalists loved the wolves to death on Isle Royale!!