ISLE ROYALE, Mich (KMSP) – Isle Royale sits like a gem in a cold ring of Lake Superior water, some 15 miles off the shore of Grand Portage, Minnesota. Its isolation has been key to the island’s preservation. It sits today as a national park, not much different from when Norwegian fisherman built the first fish camps on its shores in the mid-1800’s.
A pristine island of some 210 square miles, it was a privilege to visit. To see the young bull moose swimming across a bay on our boat trip in or to come face to face with this cow moose freezing us in our steps on an island trail, was to experience nature unencumbered by man.
Time spent on the island allows you to slow down and think of the world in simpler terms. That is until you consider the very complicated national debate over reintroducing wolves to Isle Royale.
Ice bridges during the cold winter months enabled the first grey wolves to find the island 75 years ago, and they stayed, because they found food in the moose population.
Over the decades, the predator/prey populations ebbed and flowed. It was a forest ecosystem that worked; scientists studied it, but for the most part, did not interfere.
Then, the ice bridges stopped forming, and the wolves, after peaking at a population of 50, started dying. Canine Parvovirus took many, while wolves killing other wolves took some. They died at an alarming rate. Conversely, the moose, with fewer canines to hunt them down, grew in numbers of an equally alarming pace.
Today, more than 1600 moose roam the island. Now, with only two aging and non-breeding wolves left to hunt them, the National Park Service is wrestling with whether man should step in and change the course of nature. The NPS is also struggling with the relative “do not touch” scientific philosophy of Isle Royale and what re-introducing a new pack of wolves, taken from the mainland, and deposited on the island, would mean.
A career spent studying Isle Royale
Rolf Peterson, a research biologist at Michigan Tech., was a 22-year-old graduate student when he first stepped foot on Isle Royale. There is not a trail, and barely a tree, he doesn’t know. Peterson is known around the world for his wolf and moose research conducted on the island. No one knows more about the connection between a healthy wolf population, healthy moose population and a healthy island than Peterson does.
Peterson has spent 50 years of his life studying the predator/prey balance, and says the dynamic has clearly changed. The moose population is trending up rapidly and, in his view, doing nothing would be disastrous for the ecosystem.
“The moose will destroy the forest. It will take several decades and several ups and downs of population eruptions and crashes of moose, but basically the forest as we know it would disappear,” Peterson said.
Moose love balsam fir, it’s a major food source and the main tree of the island. These enormous herbivores will eat every seedling in sight. Peterson pointed us to the western part of Isle Royale where over the decades moose have over grazed the area. Today it is a barren spruce and grass environment, and that, Peterson says, is what most of this national park would become with a moose “only” ecosystem.
Peterson believes reintroducing wolves will help bring the moose population back down to a more manageable level.
“The main issue here is there’s a moose population that’s like a runaway freight train right now, and if we let it runaway, it will be to the detriment of the entire national park.”
Unsustainable wolf population
Scientists and the NPS agree, the two remaining wolves at seven and nine years old will not live much longer and cannot affect a moose population that will likely double inside of five years. Leaving the NPS to decide who knows better: Man or Mother Nature.
The NPS this week signaled there does seem to be movement, not only toward a decision, but also toward reintroducing wolves. Officially releasing this statement:
“NPS is currently producing a final environmental impact statement with a preferred alternative to re-introduce wolves to the island. This alternative would provide a large enough number of wolves with the goal of establishing a healthy population that functions as an apex predator. A decision is expected after the document is released for public view.”
The NPS is expected to make a decision in the next few weeks.
Source: National Park Service debating wolf reintroduction on Isle Royale – Story | KMSP
Comments
This is an issue on which I did some work, and I think people might recognize the need for enhancing the population.
Moose were occupying the island , eating the young woody vegetation, simplifying and narrowing the spectrum of primary production. As herbivores, they NEED to be subject to predators. I suppose tat those who disagree have never read Malthus or any actual fact since the 1700s.
When Durward Allen at Purdue recognized that the wolves that walked across Lake Superior back in the late 1940s were changing the landscape into a richer world in this natural experiment. Many of the most well-known wolf researchers worked on observation of the island’s changes under him.
At that time, there was no intrusive collaring, and the Park was studied by airplanes following snow tracks and ground hiking.
Some of the better biologists who understand the necessity of apex predators, and who have up to right now, done a lot of work to save wolves from the mistake of hunting them, got their start there.
Check John Vucetichh’s work. He’s completely scientific, but one of the most important advocates for wolf.
Allen finished a book about his years in charge of the program long after he retired – It’s a really good one for the general public, called “The Wolves of Minong” He was a great person who loved wolves and all the living beings; he died I think back in 1997 about the time I moved here from the high country.
I really don’t know how Parvo got to Isle Royale – it’s a virus that emerged – evolved, only about 60 years ago, from keeping domestic dogs too close together. and suspect it was due to lax control of domestic companion dogs of public hikers.
If you explore distemper and sarcoptic mange, you’ll find that the two other main diseases that kill wolves came with humans as well. Mange was PURPOSELY introduced to wolves and coyotes in the west in the 1800s, Strychnine wasn’t apparently enough for the wolfers. That history is spread out in old books, some now gone or very hard to find.
Because of the human-caused global heating, Superior gradually lost its once more common winter ice cover (I used to dive in and swim in spurts along the cliffy North Shore in August just for the shock, I think everything but polar bears and arctic walrus and seals would get hypothermic long before they found the island. Moose actually need cold water immersion, though.
People may not know, but polar bears were once recorded pretty far south of Hudson’s Bay, and some old native Names show that they may have sometimes dispersed somewhat south of Superior.
Mech got his start there, and later did research up in the Arrowhead country on wolf-deer interactions. Before the time of most people, woodland caribou used to live in the part of Minnesota and NW Ontario near est the Island. RIght now, although the public media doesn’t mention it, moose in adjacent Minnesota are dying off. While prion disease from whitetail are a factor, it’s rarely stated that moose can’t handle temperatures consistently over 70 degrees or so.
Anyway, the isolation of the tiny wolf population and its steady loss of heterozygosity (meaning that successive generations inbred – even though wolves hate to inbreed. That inbreeding caused wolves to have more and more of the same genes- it’s a simple arithmetical thing, until they became like siblings) , allowed it to be used by advocates (me, too) in badgering USFWS every time they planned an alternative that in any way isolated small wolf populations, through hunting laws, draconian state antiwolf policies, or poor recovery plans like the present Mexican Wolf recovery Plan.
(ALL biologists spoke up against the Interstate 40 north boundary !). Peterson and Vucetich have repeatedly made the point for decades that Isle Royale and any such artificial island created by human exclusion of the wolf may lead to extinction. It will just take longer than the Isle Royale natural experiment.
Although I support the goals of WIlderness organizations that want to increase the tiny amount of land on earth that is free of human destruction and exploitation, this is one case where the wilderness groups have it wrong: because of human climate change, there was not much chance of wolf survival on IR. Only one I know of made it across the water a couple decades ago.
Isle Royale does not need to suffer from defaunation – humans already do that everywhere, and there will be NO relief until the human world population falls back to a tiny proportion of what it is now. While this will happen, it will only be after our kind take down most or all other large vertebrates- those over about 40 lbs. Many more will then be lost forever for the same reason as the moose of IR will starve themselves after overeating IR, and of course through accelerating emergence of crowd disease, which issue I may not have elaborated on this site..
I try to make public translation of a high scientific likelihood, and IR NEEDS wolves because as you see, everywhere humans can get to them with guns, they are persecuted and may die out, unless radical change of all governments operating in the wolf’s world occurs.
Most of you have not kept up with Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Mongolia, (Kazakhstan has officially gotten better just last month, but you can find snowmobile wolf murder videos there on the internet. Japan killed their wolves, even though the original Ainu regarded them as fellow spirits; but then Japan killed off the Ainu too. (Koreans culturally don’t like wolves, in part because the Mongolians think of themselves as descended from Wolf, so I don’t think any survive even in North Korea).
I don’t know when to stop when talking about wolves, but doing some work on Amur tiger, some researchers proved for me that the only other species besides humans that manages to kill off wolves in their territory, is the big Siberian/Amur tiger. .
India is moving toward wolf killing, because the women have not been taught to care closely for their babies. This latter is a basic human problem – women just want to let the children go teir own way . Our hubris dictates tat most humans (like Mech, etc) prefer to do the Eurothing and kill wolves and any other possible mortality source, instead of caring for young like Crocodiles, snakes, birds, and many frogs and fish do.
Anyway, Peterson has been issuing this moose deforestation problem for decades, and I hope you will agree. The final EIS won’t allow for any significant public input for policy change; it’s just a notice required by law (which the Trump administration and republicans will gut as soon as they can, further accelerating the extinction of wolf, bear, frog, most of the life you can hear, and consequently one day, all the life you still see.
I know that native tribes rightly want to deal with US wildlife policies on a nation-to-nation basis, but there’s a number of specific tribes who have accepted far too much Euro-lifestyle, and have written up wolf policy statements that almost verbatim, read like Idaho, Montana, and Wyoming policies.
This last reason, just like the christian missionary crap/financial support for native indoctrination done by the side of my family with some indigenous blood, is why, again, I can only stand for Wolf, and no human culture that does not specifically hold them in equal regard to the self.
I hope that Protect the Wolves always remains the one who speaks for wolf in all situations.
This is an issue on which I did some work, and I think people might recognize the need for enhancing the population.
Moose were occupying the island , eating the young woody vegetation, simplifying and narrowing the spectrum of primary production. As herbivores, they NEED to be subject to predators. I suppose that those who disagree have never read Malthus or any actual fact since the 1700s.
Durward Allen at Purdue recognized that the wolves that walked across Lake Superior back in the late 1940s were changing the landscape into a richer world in this natural experiment. Many of the most well-known wolf researchers worked on observation of the island’s changes under him.
At that time, there was no intrusive collaring, and the Park was studied by airplanes following snow tracks and ground hiking.
Some of the better biologists who understand the necessity of apex predators, and who have up to right now, done a lot of work to save wolves from the mistake of hunting them, got their start there.
Check John Vucetich’s work. He’s completely scientific, but one of the most important advocates for wolf.
Allen finished a book about his years in charge of the program long after he retired – It’s a really good one for the general public, called “The Wolves of Minong” He was a great person who loved wolves and all the living beings; he died I think back in 1997 about the time I moved here from the high country.
I really don’t know how Parvo got to Isle Royale – it’s a virus that emerged – evolved, only about 60 years ago, from keeping domestic dogs too close together. and suspect it was due to lax control of hikers’ domestic companion dogs
Distemper and sarcoptic mange, the two other main diseases that kill wolves come with humans as well. Mange was PURPOSELY introduced to wolves and coyotes in the west in the 1800s, Strychnine wasn’t apparently enough for the wolfers. That history is spread out in old books, some now gone or very hard to find.
Because of human-caused global heating, Superior gradually lost its once more common winter ice cover (I used to dive in and swim in spurts along the cliffy North Shore in August just for the shock, I think everything but polar bears and arctic walrus and seals would get hypothermic long before they found the island. Moose actually need cold water immersion, though.
People may not know, but polar bears were once recorded pretty far south of Hudson’s Bay, and some old native Names show that they may have sometimes dispersed somewhat south of Superior.
Mech got his start there, and later did research up in the Arrowhead country on wolf-deer interactions. Before the time of most people, woodland caribou used to live in the part of Minnesota and NW Ontario nearest the Island. RIght now, although the public media doesn’t mention it, moose in adjacent Minnesota are dying off. While disease from whitetail are a factor, it’s rarely stated that moose can’t handle temperatures consistently over 70 degrees or so.
Anyway, the isolation of the tiny wolf population and its steady loss of heterozygosity (meaning that successive generations inbred – even though wolves hate to inbreed. That inbreeding caused wolves to have more and more of the same genes- it’s a simple arithmetical thing, until they became like siblings) , allowed it to be used by advocates (me, too) in badgering USFWS every time they planned an alternative that in any way isolated small wolf populations, through hunting laws, draconian state antiwolf policies, or poor recovery plans like the present Mexican Wolf recovery Plan. (ALL biologists spoke up against the Interstate 40 north boundary !). Peterson and Vucetich have repeatedly made the point for decades that Isle Royale and any artificial island created by human exclusion of the wolf may lead to extinction. It will just take longer than the Isle Royale natural experiment.
Although I support the goals of WIlderness organizations to increase the tiny amount of land on earth that is free of human destruction and exploitation, this is one case where the wilderness groups have it wrong: because of human climate change, there was not much chance of wolf survival on IR. Only one I know of made it across the water a couple decades ago.
Isle Royale does not need to suffer from defaunation – humans already do that everywhere, and there will be NO relief until the human world population falls back to a tiny proportion of what it is now. While this will happen, it will only be after our kind take down other large vertebrates- those over about 40 lbs. Many more will then be lost forever for the same reason as the moose of IR will starve themselves after overeating IR, and of course through accelerating emergence of crowd disease, which issue I may not have elaborated on this site..
I try to make public translation of a high scientific likelihood, and IR NEEDS wolves because as you see, everywhere humans can get to them with guns, they are persecuted and may die out, unless radical change of all governments operating in the wolf’s world occurs.
Most of you have not kept up with Norway, Sweden, Finland, Russia, Mongolia, (Kazakhstan has officially gotten better just last month, but you can find snowmobile wolf murder videos there on the internet. Japan killed their wolves, even though the original Ainu regarded them as fellow spirits; but then Japan killed off the Ainu too. (Koreans culturally don’t like wolves, in part because the Mongolians think of themselves as descended from Wolf, so I don’t think any survive even in North Korea).
I don’t know when to stop when talking about wolves, but doing some work on Amur tiger, some researchers proved for me that the only other species besides humans that manages to kill off wolves in their territory, is the big Siberian/Amur tiger. .
India is moving toward wolf killing, because recent parents have not been taught to care closely for their babies. Our hubris dictates tat most humans (like Mech, etc) prefer to do the Eurothing and kill wolves and any other possible mortality source, instead of caring for young as even Crocodiles, snakes, birds, and many frogs and fish do.
Anyway, Peterson has been issuing this moose deforestation problem for decades. The final EIS won’t allow for any significant public input for policy change; it’s just a notice required by law (which the Trump administration and republicans will gut as soon as they can, further accelerating the extinction of wolf, bear, frog, most of the life you can hear, and consequently one day, all the life you still see.
I know that native tribes rightly want to deal with US wildlife policies on a nation-to-nation basis, but there’s a number of specific tribes who have accepted far too much Euro-lifestyle, and have written up wolf policy statements that almost verbatim, read like ID, MT, and WY policies.
Who stands for wolf?
I hope that Protect the Wolves always remains the one who speaks for wolf in all situations.
Found a sample of Durward Allen’s :
“On this continent and in the world, Isle Royale is an almost unique repository of primitive conditions. Like a priceless antique, it will be even more valuable in time not far ahead. The great carnivore removes the elders, the ailing, the afflicted and also, no doubt the foolish and incompetent. For the moose it is a health, welfare, and eugenic program of inscrutable realism. This is the most important of our findings. In it we have the key to why both moose and wolf are what they are, and indeed to the character of wilderness. This system and these dependencies matured through ages beyond our reckoning.”
Please remove the first of my comments – It didnt register, and I thought it was a repeat rejection for being too long. It also mentions some personal information not useful. Thank you.