Post by Bozur on Apr 12, 2005 17:04:43 GMT -5
NYTimes.com > Science
Truth in the Wild: A Great Dad That Wanders Wide
By JIM ROBBINS
Published: April 12, 2005
Bill Garwood
New research about the wolverine, already known for its strength and roaming ability, shows that it moves at about 5 miles per hour whether the terrain is rough or easy.
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. - In the gathering darkness four biologists wearing headlamps surround an unconscious wolverine that is flat on its back, legs akimbo. They check a transmitter implanted in its belly and fit another larger one on a collar around its heavily muscled neck.
Then they inject the animal with the antidote to the drug that knocked it out, and place it in a box trap. An hour or so later, when the lid of the trap is opened, the animal clambers out and runs into the forest.
Every two hours the position of the wolverine - known as M-1 - is fixed by a geo-positioning satellite and recorded in the collar. A few weeks later the wolverine is recaptured, and a record of its travels is downloaded from the collar into a laptop. The result confirms data that the researchers have accumulated over three years. Wolverines are wildly peripatetic.
"The hallmark of the wolverine is its insatiable need to keep moving," said Dr. Jeff Copeland, principle investigator of the research project, and a wildlife biologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station of the United States Forest Service in Missoula. "I don't know any animal that moves like this every day. Nothing close."
The wolverine, a creature of the northern forests that resembles a small bear, is legendary for its strength and ferocity.
"Picture a weasel," Ernest Seton Thompson, the naturalist, wrote in 1909, "and most of us can do that, for we have met that little demon of destruction, that small atom of insensate courage, that symbol of slaughter, sleeplessness and tireless, incredible activity - picture that scrap of demoniac fury, multiply that mite some 50 times, and you have the likeness of a wolverine."
An Austrian biologist named Peter Krott, who raised wolverines and wrote about them in his 1959 book "Demon of the North," said one of his animals, named Rosa, got caught in a leg hold trap and traveled back home on three legs for weeks carrying the steel trap in her jaws, before collapsing on his doorstep.
John Krebs, a biologist in British Columbia who studied wolverines for seven years and is writing up his research, said that in the 1930's a wolverine kept chewing into a log meat locker at a mountain lodge and dragging slabs of meat out. Leg hold traps were set. One day the trapper surprised the wolverine at work. With traps on three legs it was still trying to drag a carcass.
The tales that have accumulated about the animals would have it that one wolverine can pull a moose carcass on its own. Mr. Krebs documented a 35-pound wolverine dragging a mountain goat several kilometers and across a major highway.
"Determined," said Mr. Krebs. "That describes them best."
The new research shows a wolverine that seems driven to roam. It keeps on moving at about 5 miles per hour whether the terrain is rough or easy. With broad feet that serve as natural snowshoes, it easily scrambles over 10,000-foot snow-covered mountains, crosses giant scree piles and lopes through lichen-draped forests, sometimes covering 25 miles one day and 25 miles back the next. A male's home range is about 500 square miles, about the same as that of a grizzly bear, which is 10 times its size.
A male covers that huge swath of territory both to mate with three or four females and to rummage in avalanche chutes for the carcasses of moose or mountain goats that have perished, to hunt squirrels and insects or scrounge for berries. "The things it needs to make a living are scattered so they need that big an area to find what they need," Dr. Copeland said.
"Everyone who studies the animal comes away impressed by it," said the wildlife biologist Rick Yates, who works on the study.
Wolverines are very similar to the Tasmanian devil but not related to it and are said to be fearless. "A wolverine can probably hold its own against any other carnivore," Dr. Copeland said. But it seldom fights because "it can probably bluff its way out of any confrontation."
Before it was freed from the trap in Glacier, M-1 growled and woofed as researchers neared the box. When Dr. Copeland, who has never been bitten, cracked the lid, the animal lunged forward snarling and ripped out pieces of the log with its teeth.
Wolverines are also proving to have a family life unusual for carnivores. Males have been known to wait outside a trap for a captured mate. No other young adult carnivores are known to maintain companionship with their doting fathers. But wolverines do.
In Idaho, in the 1990's, Dr. Copeland said, he kept catching a young female wolverine called 203. She couldn't survive on her own, and was living on the bait in the trap. The next day Dr. Copeland's wildlife technician called from an aircraft and said, "You're not going to believe this, but little 203 is with Socks."
Socks, with four white feet, was the patriarch wolverine of the area, and probably was 203's father. She would spend two or three days with Socks, then they would split, then come back together for two or three days. "I think he was teaching her to survive," Dr. Copeland said. "It suggests male parental care, which in carnivores is unheard of. But it enhances the kit survival and assures likelihood of passing on his genes."
Wolverines, the largest member of the weasel family, inhabit tundra and high mountain habitat around the globe. They are found throughout Alaska and much of northern Canada, but in the contiguous United States their range extends only into the northern Rockies in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. A few have also been sighted in northern Washington State. Because the animals are so reclusive, population numbers are difficult to estimate, but Dr. Copeland said the population in the Lower 48 is "in the hundreds, not the thousands."
Until the 1930's they were found as far south as the Sierra Nevada in California and in Colorado. "Wholesale poisoning probably whacked them," Dr. Copeland said. There are none in Michigan, the Wolverine State, he added.
Because they are secretive and so little is known about the wolverine, humans have filled in the gaps with myth. The wolverine has earned names like "devil bear" and was believed by some tribes to be a spirit animal that connected the living and the dead.
Female wolverines give birth to three or four tiny helpless white kits each winter in a multichambered den they excavate in the snow in high mountain cirques. They are fiercely protective and work hard in harsh conditions to find enough food to sustain their offspring.
The high country is where wolverines become controversial.
Winter recreation - including backcountry skiing, helicopter skiing and snowmobiling - is a fast growing pastime in the Rockies, and people often invade the redoubts where wolverines make their dens.
"We're seeing increases in winter recreation from people in areas so remote now that never had activity before," said Stephen Hoffman, executive director of the Predator Conservation Alliance, a conservation group in Bozeman, Mont. "Because of the intrusion," Mr. Hoffman said, "they may abandon their den and move their kits."
They are sensitive to intruders. In one case documented by Mr. Krebs wolverines abandoned their den because of a heli-skiing operation, in which skiers are dropped by helicopter on remote mountaintops. Dr. Copeland inadvertently caused two wolverines to move their dens during a study by coming too close.
Fragmentation of habitat is also a concern. No one knows how the widely scattered wolverines stay in touch with one another, and there is worry that logging, roads, homes and other development may cut them off from the rest of the population.
Conservationists have petitioned twice for wolverines to be listed as endangered, concerned that even though little is known about them, decisions are constantly being made governing their well-being.
Montana, for example, still allows trappers to take a dozen wolverines a year even though their numbers are unknown and their fur has little value. There is a small market for wolverines that are mounted by taxidermists. Montana and Alaska are the only states that allow trapping.
While the wolverine's range has shrunk considerably in the last half century, Dr. Copeland argues that at this point there's not enough data to show that the wolverine needs federal protection. "The only scientific answer is, I don't know," he said. "We need information before we understand the needs of the animal and can make that determination."
Truth in the Wild: A Great Dad That Wanders Wide
By JIM ROBBINS
Published: April 12, 2005
Bill Garwood
New research about the wolverine, already known for its strength and roaming ability, shows that it moves at about 5 miles per hour whether the terrain is rough or easy.
GLACIER NATIONAL PARK, Mont. - In the gathering darkness four biologists wearing headlamps surround an unconscious wolverine that is flat on its back, legs akimbo. They check a transmitter implanted in its belly and fit another larger one on a collar around its heavily muscled neck.
Then they inject the animal with the antidote to the drug that knocked it out, and place it in a box trap. An hour or so later, when the lid of the trap is opened, the animal clambers out and runs into the forest.
Every two hours the position of the wolverine - known as M-1 - is fixed by a geo-positioning satellite and recorded in the collar. A few weeks later the wolverine is recaptured, and a record of its travels is downloaded from the collar into a laptop. The result confirms data that the researchers have accumulated over three years. Wolverines are wildly peripatetic.
"The hallmark of the wolverine is its insatiable need to keep moving," said Dr. Jeff Copeland, principle investigator of the research project, and a wildlife biologist at the Rocky Mountain Research Station of the United States Forest Service in Missoula. "I don't know any animal that moves like this every day. Nothing close."
The wolverine, a creature of the northern forests that resembles a small bear, is legendary for its strength and ferocity.
"Picture a weasel," Ernest Seton Thompson, the naturalist, wrote in 1909, "and most of us can do that, for we have met that little demon of destruction, that small atom of insensate courage, that symbol of slaughter, sleeplessness and tireless, incredible activity - picture that scrap of demoniac fury, multiply that mite some 50 times, and you have the likeness of a wolverine."
An Austrian biologist named Peter Krott, who raised wolverines and wrote about them in his 1959 book "Demon of the North," said one of his animals, named Rosa, got caught in a leg hold trap and traveled back home on three legs for weeks carrying the steel trap in her jaws, before collapsing on his doorstep.
John Krebs, a biologist in British Columbia who studied wolverines for seven years and is writing up his research, said that in the 1930's a wolverine kept chewing into a log meat locker at a mountain lodge and dragging slabs of meat out. Leg hold traps were set. One day the trapper surprised the wolverine at work. With traps on three legs it was still trying to drag a carcass.
The tales that have accumulated about the animals would have it that one wolverine can pull a moose carcass on its own. Mr. Krebs documented a 35-pound wolverine dragging a mountain goat several kilometers and across a major highway.
"Determined," said Mr. Krebs. "That describes them best."
The new research shows a wolverine that seems driven to roam. It keeps on moving at about 5 miles per hour whether the terrain is rough or easy. With broad feet that serve as natural snowshoes, it easily scrambles over 10,000-foot snow-covered mountains, crosses giant scree piles and lopes through lichen-draped forests, sometimes covering 25 miles one day and 25 miles back the next. A male's home range is about 500 square miles, about the same as that of a grizzly bear, which is 10 times its size.
A male covers that huge swath of territory both to mate with three or four females and to rummage in avalanche chutes for the carcasses of moose or mountain goats that have perished, to hunt squirrels and insects or scrounge for berries. "The things it needs to make a living are scattered so they need that big an area to find what they need," Dr. Copeland said.
"Everyone who studies the animal comes away impressed by it," said the wildlife biologist Rick Yates, who works on the study.
Wolverines are very similar to the Tasmanian devil but not related to it and are said to be fearless. "A wolverine can probably hold its own against any other carnivore," Dr. Copeland said. But it seldom fights because "it can probably bluff its way out of any confrontation."
Before it was freed from the trap in Glacier, M-1 growled and woofed as researchers neared the box. When Dr. Copeland, who has never been bitten, cracked the lid, the animal lunged forward snarling and ripped out pieces of the log with its teeth.
Wolverines are also proving to have a family life unusual for carnivores. Males have been known to wait outside a trap for a captured mate. No other young adult carnivores are known to maintain companionship with their doting fathers. But wolverines do.
In Idaho, in the 1990's, Dr. Copeland said, he kept catching a young female wolverine called 203. She couldn't survive on her own, and was living on the bait in the trap. The next day Dr. Copeland's wildlife technician called from an aircraft and said, "You're not going to believe this, but little 203 is with Socks."
Socks, with four white feet, was the patriarch wolverine of the area, and probably was 203's father. She would spend two or three days with Socks, then they would split, then come back together for two or three days. "I think he was teaching her to survive," Dr. Copeland said. "It suggests male parental care, which in carnivores is unheard of. But it enhances the kit survival and assures likelihood of passing on his genes."
Wolverines, the largest member of the weasel family, inhabit tundra and high mountain habitat around the globe. They are found throughout Alaska and much of northern Canada, but in the contiguous United States their range extends only into the northern Rockies in Montana, Idaho and Wyoming. A few have also been sighted in northern Washington State. Because the animals are so reclusive, population numbers are difficult to estimate, but Dr. Copeland said the population in the Lower 48 is "in the hundreds, not the thousands."
Until the 1930's they were found as far south as the Sierra Nevada in California and in Colorado. "Wholesale poisoning probably whacked them," Dr. Copeland said. There are none in Michigan, the Wolverine State, he added.
Because they are secretive and so little is known about the wolverine, humans have filled in the gaps with myth. The wolverine has earned names like "devil bear" and was believed by some tribes to be a spirit animal that connected the living and the dead.
Female wolverines give birth to three or four tiny helpless white kits each winter in a multichambered den they excavate in the snow in high mountain cirques. They are fiercely protective and work hard in harsh conditions to find enough food to sustain their offspring.
The high country is where wolverines become controversial.
Winter recreation - including backcountry skiing, helicopter skiing and snowmobiling - is a fast growing pastime in the Rockies, and people often invade the redoubts where wolverines make their dens.
"We're seeing increases in winter recreation from people in areas so remote now that never had activity before," said Stephen Hoffman, executive director of the Predator Conservation Alliance, a conservation group in Bozeman, Mont. "Because of the intrusion," Mr. Hoffman said, "they may abandon their den and move their kits."
They are sensitive to intruders. In one case documented by Mr. Krebs wolverines abandoned their den because of a heli-skiing operation, in which skiers are dropped by helicopter on remote mountaintops. Dr. Copeland inadvertently caused two wolverines to move their dens during a study by coming too close.
Fragmentation of habitat is also a concern. No one knows how the widely scattered wolverines stay in touch with one another, and there is worry that logging, roads, homes and other development may cut them off from the rest of the population.
Conservationists have petitioned twice for wolverines to be listed as endangered, concerned that even though little is known about them, decisions are constantly being made governing their well-being.
Montana, for example, still allows trappers to take a dozen wolverines a year even though their numbers are unknown and their fur has little value. There is a small market for wolverines that are mounted by taxidermists. Montana and Alaska are the only states that allow trapping.
While the wolverine's range has shrunk considerably in the last half century, Dr. Copeland argues that at this point there's not enough data to show that the wolverine needs federal protection. "The only scientific answer is, I don't know," he said. "We need information before we understand the needs of the animal and can make that determination."