Wolves At Large

[cronus]

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-essex-25091939

Wolf on the run, two shot dead after Colchester Zoo escape

Two wolves have been shot dead and a third is on the run after escaping from their enclosure at Colchester Zoo.

Staff at the zoo found the perimeter fence damaged and five of the six timber wolves escaped.

One returned of its own accord, a second wolf was darted and caught and a further two shot.

(continued, timid never bit anyone till you?)

[Blind groper]

Darting is the way to go. We have some two legged wolves around here that could make good moving targets. Watch out, though. They probably have rabies.

[piscator]

I think Blonde grouper needs to get out of the pub. Wolves need to run free.
Last I heard, there were 23 separate packs on the Kenai Peninsula, 9 or 10 ranging within 20 miles of my home.
Shame about the 7-foot 200-lb plus canis lupus alces, a local subspecies that specialized in moose. But the big wolves depended upon large moose populations, which in turn depended upon vast acreages of pioneer plant species brought about by big wildfires in our area. Since fire control became a policy, moose populations have dwindled and smaller wolves more fit to work the mountain sheep and goats have predominated.

[mistermack]

I think Blonde grouper needs to get out of the pub. Wolves need to run free.
Last I heard, there were 23 separate packs on the Kenai Peninsula, 9 or 10 ranging within 20 miles of my home.
Shame about the 7-foot 200-lb plus canis lupus alces, a local subspecies that specialized in moose. But the big wolves depended upon large moose populations, which in turn depended upon vast acreages of pioneer plant species brought about by big wildfires in our area. Since fire control became a policy, moose populations have dwindled and smaller wolves more fit to work the mountain sheep and goats have predominated.

Nah, shooting and poisoning killed off all the original biggest species of timber wolves and drove them to local extinction. And shooting Moose doesn't help either. I doubt if fire control had much to do with it. Evolution doesn't work that fast.

[Tyrannical]

I'm all for reintroducing wolves to an urban environment, massive tax payer savings combined with a ready food supply for the wolves is a win win situation.

[Jason]

I'z saw a wolf aboot 20 minutes ago. A lone adolescent in the middle of a local reservoir (obviously frozen over). Not sure what he/she was doing there.

[piscator]

I think Blonde grouper needs to get out of the pub. Wolves need to run free.
Last I heard, there were 23 separate packs on the Kenai Peninsula, 9 or 10 ranging within 20 miles of my home.
Shame about the 7-foot 200-lb plus canis lupus alces, a local subspecies that specialized in moose. But the big wolves depended upon large moose populations, which in turn depended upon vast acreages of pioneer plant species brought about by big wildfires in our area. Since fire control became a policy, moose populations have dwindled and smaller wolves more fit to work the mountain sheep and goats have predominated.

Nah, shooting and poisoning killed off all the original biggest species of timber wolves and drove them to local extinction. And shooting Moose doesn't help either. I doubt if fire control had much to do with it. Evolution doesn't work that fast.

Who told you that?


Biggest fire in recorded history in on the Kenai was about 90k acres. That area has since grown back to a closed canopy which precludes the growth of a lot of the willows which make year-round moose food. There's evidence of a lot bigger fires in the past though.
Open up the tree canopy by fire or logging, and fast growing nutritious species grow in good soil and light until the spruce/hemlock get big enough to cut the sunlight. Willows disappear and are replaced by lower growing plant species like devil's club that can tolerate less light, but don't grow as fast and don't produce as much moose food value.


I doubt lupus alces was a real subspecies anyway. More like a pack or two with big genes. It's not like you can put wolves under a microscope and observe them 'til your heart's content.

This is population dynamics more than "Evolution". And it's not the Old World where flocks of sheep and goats were wolf magnets and concentrators until the invention of firearms gave herdsmen the upper hand.

[Jason]

Yar. Forest fires are regenerative for the local ecology. Go check out a fire site one year after. Luscious greens for Moose, Deer, and other herbivores, that wasn't there before.

[mistermack]

In the very short period when fires have been controlled, there is no chance of natural selection causing such a big change in the size of the wolves.
Less food would just mean fewer wolves in the short term. The only way you would get a big size change, is extinction of the local wolves, followed by an influx of smaller wolves.
The exceptional size wasn't necessarily due to hunting Moose, anyway. That might have been the theory, when they were named, but it doesn't have to be true.
It could be partly that, but could be due to other factors, like the high numbers of bears, or the type of bears, or the salmon run, or the climate, or other local factors.

A peninsula is a bit like an Island. The local genes get compressed, without the the regular influx of outsiders.
So the Kodiak bears are bigger than Grizzlies, it's the island effect. It can work the other way, you can get very small versions evolving on islands.

[Xamonas Chegwé]

Yar. Forest fires are regenerative for the local ecology. Go check out a fire site one year after. Luscious greens for Moose, Deer, and other herbivores, that wasn't there before.

Part of the natural order. Thing is, hoominz don't like living in houses that burn down every 30 years or so.

[Jason]

True. The AGW people don't like the release of sequestered carbon much either. It screws up their graphs!

[piscator]

In the very short period when fires have been controlled, there is no chance of natural selection causing such a big change in the size of the wolves.
Less food would just mean fewer wolves in the short term. The only way you would get a big size change, is extinction of the local wolves, followed by an influx of smaller wolves.
The exceptional size wasn't necessarily due to hunting Moose, anyway. That might have been the theory, when they were named, but it doesn't have to be true.
It could be partly that, but could be due to other factors, like the high numbers of bears, or the type of bears, or the salmon run, or the climate, or other local factors.

A peninsula is a bit like an Island. The local genes get compressed, without the the regular influx of outsiders.
So the Kodiak bears are bigger than Grizzlies, it's the island effect. It can work the other way, you can get very small versions evolving on islands.

Kodiak has had a unique geologic history of refugia during succeeding ice ages which concentrated the island effect and brought about an inbred population of bears and foxes, and some plants. The Alaska Peninsula and the Kenai also have great big bears, but for some different reasons. Their skulls are also shaped a little differently than the Kodiaks.

But like I said, lupus alces [the Alaska moose is Alces alces] is probably a taxonomic error of the 1940s more than a true species. It seems likely, given that the alpha is usually the only male in a pack who passes on his genes with any regularity, that a line or two of large wolves came to predominate on the Kenai bottoms and flats and push packs of smaller wolves to the margins. These big wolves became accustomed to and then dependent on the moose. Enter the USFS and its hotshot crews and planeloads of fire retardants. Wildfires become smaller, and burnovers cease to be large enough to keep a critical mass of moose at a given population. Throw in a plague or two of hair lice and growing human populations in the river bottoms, and now the high alpine margins become more favored wolf country...

I stood at Primrose and watched through a spotting scope as wolves on Andy Simons Mountain trapped a Dall ewe and lamb, and took them both in the soft snow one February morning. Most of the wolves were black, BTW.
I doubt lupus alces was a real subspecies anyway. But if it makes you feel better, I've come across wolf tracks in South Fork that were bigger than my fairly large outstretched fisherman's hands, which would indicate one bigass wolf.

[mistermack]

I read a book years and years ago about the history of wolves. It was a brilliant book, I usually skim but I read that right through. I wish I'd kept it. The guy had loads of info about ancient wolf trails across Europe, thousands of years old, and about the various sub species round the world, and how they have interacted with humans.

He mentioned the Kenai wolf, of course, as it was claimed to have been the biggest sub-species at the time, and said that it was hunted and poisoned to extinction many years ago by the Alaskans. There were old photos of very big wolf-pelts hanging up against cabin walls, with hunters posing with their rifles.

Whether the claims of size were exaggerated I don't know, they usually are. I'd be interested to know if any skeletons remain.
The biggest verified recorded wolves are European, from the Ukraine area, I believe, so it doesn't HAVE to be on a peninsula or island with lots of moose for wolves to grow really big.

[piscator]

I can't buy the "Hunted and poisoned into extinction" story...

1. There haven't been a lot of people on the Kenai for very long, and very few of them have had any reason to poison wolves. There's very little livestock here.

2. Trapping wolves with any regularity in Alaska is next to impossible. The best wolf trappers get 3 or 4 a year, maybe. Wolves are hard to find, they don't stick around, and a trapper would have to cover hundreds of miles a day over big mountains in the Kenai. The State of Alaska has a dubious airborne wolf kill program supposedly to help ensure moose calf survival in areas frequented by city dwelling hunters, but they fly 3-4 helicopters and a few contract Super Cubs in a 3000 square mile area and maybe get 6 or 8 in the course of a winter. They might do a little better in the Barren Ground with regular caribou migrations, but hunting or trapping wolves is something very few people do on purpose. Wolves are usually targets of opportunity.
I personally know 1 person who has ever trapped a wolf - it was in a fox set near Lake Louise and he figures he got there about 10 minutes after the wolf, because the wolf had just started gnawing at the trap anchor. It was just the wolf's bad luck that of 54 million square miles of The Great Land, he just happened to step in the wrong 4" circle.
Imagine attempting to engineer that deliberately, in the days when you had to strap on 6' snowshoes to get around in the limited daylight of the one season when you had more than a passing chance to glimpse a wolf.

Add 1. and 2. together, and it's unlikely that people with rifles and rat poison drove an entire "subspecies" to extinction in 80 or 90 years of gold mining and recreational fishing. If they were that proficient and determined, they would have cleaned out most of the rest of the wolves in the area while they were at it.

[mistermack]

What you say sounds reasonable, but it's possible you underestimate just how efficient the hunters and trappers of old actually were. The government ran a very effective campaign to eradicate the wolf, and paid a hefty bounty for each one killed.
I was quite surprised when I found this site : http://www.wolfweb.com/history2.html I didn't know just how determined they were to kill every wolf.
They managed to exterminate the wolf in most states, but they don't specifically mention Alaska. They obviously didn't succeed completely in Alaska, but they seem to have partly succeeded, as far as the Kenai Wolf is concerned.
When you say that they would have killed all the other wolves too, well, they tried to do just that, but didn't get them all.
So it's ordinary non ''alces'' wolves that have expanded back into Kenai.

That website says that it was poisoning with strychnine that was most efficient. I should imagine that that was true.
The book I mentioned, I must have read in the 1960s, and he was catagoric that the wolf was extinct in the Kenai peninsula at the time. I don't know if that was true. I'd love to read that book again, I just did a search online, but nothing looked familiar.
It might have been a library book.

Anyway, I just looked online again, and wikipedia actually has a page on the Kenai subspecies, and they say that it's PROBABLY extinct, and blame organised hunting and poisoning. If you search for Kenai wolf, it doesn't come up, it's actually called the Kenai Peninsula Wolf : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenai_Peninsula_wolf
The dna of the current wolves is the same as for the rest of Alaska, so there is no detected relic of the original Peninsula wolf.
Whether they were genuinely extinct or not would be hard to prove, as you could never prove for sure that some didn't live on, but there were no reports of wolves until the recent repopulation. But the dna evidence says that they went extinct.