Gray wolves carry young pups over rugged terrain to track spring elk migration

The gray wolf puppies were born almost helpless: blind, deaf and devoid of the acute smell of their elders. They generally remain within the safe limits of their denment until they have at least three weeks.

This is why the biologists of the Berkeley UC were surprised to observe the gray wolves near the Yellowstone National Park traveling 20 kilometers or more on an uneven and mountainous land, with very young puppies.

“The first time I saw a photo of a camera trap of a wolf carrying his puppy, I just cracks because the puppy is transported by his buttocks,” said Avery Shawler, the first author of a new study presenting the results, which appeared online today (August 1) in the newspaper in the newspaper Current biology. “You can imagine a child wiggle and the mother being just:” Very well, we do that. “”

Shawler and other researchers believe that wolves have undertaken these risky trips to bring their wapitis packs closer, their favorite prey, during the Wapiti spring migration to higher altitudes. The study is the first time that gray wolves outside the Arctic have been observed by migrating or moving their territorial range, to be closer to prey during the puppy’s breeding season.

“Our results counted years of hypotheses by researchers that migratory migration migrant migrants can escape predation in the spring because [their predators] are linked to the dens and immobile offspring, “said the main author of the Arthur Middleton study, professor of science, policies and environmental management of Berkeley.

Understanding how the wolves adapt to the movements of their prey is the key to conservation of the two species, said Shawler. He can help land managers to understand seasonal models of human life conflict in an ecosystem that includes both ranches and wilderness, where wolves can consider livestock as a tasty alternative to Wapitis.

“In the United States, more wolves live outside protected areas than in protected areas, and these wolves will overlap with humans and livestock,” said Shawler, who has finished a doctorate. In UC Berkeley in 2024. “Our research gives an overview of the behavior of wolves living on work landscapes and how they had to adapt to an environment different from what wolves dealt with 100 years ago.”

Gray wolves were reintroduced in Yellowstone National Park in 1995, and researchers believe that their population in the largest Yellowstone ecosystem has since reached around 500 tens of thousands of partially migratory wapitis also live in the region.

Climate change and changes in land use exerts pressure on the two species and lead them to adapt accordingly. Previous research carried out by Middleton has shown that the time of the annual migration of the Wapitis is currently evolving, the Wapitis arriving at their winter ranges up to 50 days later in 2015 compared to 2001.

To explore how the Wapitis migration migration patterns have an impact on the behavior of wolves, the researchers used GPS necklaces to follow the 19 gray wolf movements and 99 Wapitis in the Yellowstone Greater Yellow East Yellowstone Ecosystem between 2019 and 2021.

They found that wolves are surprisingly adaptable to the movements of their prey. Some flocks of Wapitis in Yellowstone only migrate short distances in the spring, and the wolf packs that followed them generally remained on the same territory where they have established their dens for the first time. Other flocks of Wapitis travel much longer distances in the spring, and the wolf packs that followed them had to become more creative, adopting behaviors that researchers called “the shuttle” and “migration”.

The researchers used the term “journey” to describe the temporary incursions taken outside the territories of the original wolves, generally to follow the herds of migratory wapitis.

Wolves have “migrated” when they moved to a completely new seasonal range, following a waper migrating up to 50 kilometers. Sometimes they transported small puppies up to 20 kilometers from their original dens to new “appointments” sites.

“In Yellowstone, research has shown how a large part of the mortality of wolves can come from other packs that come and kill puppies, because there are a lot of packs in space and food,” said Shawler. “It is quite wild that this risky behavior of moving young puppies occurs even when this happens next to it.”

The results can shed light on conservation efforts and land management in any region that has gray wolves, including California, which shelters around 10 packs after wolves began to recolonize the state in 2011. Middleton co-directs the new California wolf project, which aims to understand the social and ecological factors that shape these wolf populations.

“Although it is still at the beginning, our partners in California have a strong intuition that the figures and movements of deer and elk play in the behavior of the wolf, including the predation of livestock,” said Middleton. “The work around Yellowstone sharpens our ideas and approaches as we grow the project in California.”

Additional study co-authors include Kristin J. Barker from UC Berkeley and Beyond Yellowstone Living Lab; Wenjing XU of the Senckenberg Biodiversity and Climate Research Center in Germany; and Kenneth J. Mills and Tony W. Mong of Wyoming Game and Fish Department.