The wolf reintroductions that began last year on Isle Royale are starting to bear fruit.. Reports are that two male wolves and a female are running together,and they are beginning to hunt moose calves, snowshoe hares, and beavers.
Further, it was reported today that one the last survivors of the original Isle Royale wolf population was killed in a scuffle with the new wolves. This male wolf from the original population could be the last survivor, because the other remaining wolf is a ten-year-old female that has never been radio-collared or studied. She could very well be dead by now, but researchers are trying to figure out her whereabouts.
Wolves and moose were not the original predator-prey dynamic of the island. The original dynamic involved woodland caribou, which became extirpated, and Canada lynx, which became extirpated in the 1930s, and coyotes, which became extirpated shortly after wolves arrived.
The first wolves crossed an ice bridge from the Ontario mainland and colonized the island in 1949. The moose showed up in the early 1900s and came either by swimming or through human stocking.
The original wolves of Isle Royale were a unsustainable population. The ice bridges stopped forming every year to connect the island to the Minnesota and Ontario mainlands, and new genetic material never had a chance to work its way into the population. One wolf, Old Gray Guy, did manage to walk over into the island in 1997, and he did offer some genetic rescue. However, his genes wound up swamping the population, making inbreeding issues worse.
This island, which never was known for having wolves or moose, is now a sort of experiment that is going to be managed through human interference. Every few decades, wolves will have to be released on the island, just to maintain the population’s genetic diversity.
Isle Royale now exists somewhere between a zoo and a wildlife preserve. Wolves must be maintained through constant human interference. Moose are controlled by wolf predation. Moose control the growth of trees on the island, and by continuously introducing wolves, the ecosystem is managed.
This is not an attempt to restore an ecosystem to the time of yore, before man began industrial level exploitation of the forests on the island. If it were, then the National Park Service would open up a moose season on the island with hopes of eventually extirpating them. It would restore caribou and turn loose a bunch of Canada lynx and coyotes.
But so much research and public awareness of the island comes from its studies of wolf and moose dynamics that it will be maintained as a wolf and moose park. In this way, it is an artificial wilderness.
But no place affords such easy access to wolf and moose predator-prey population dynamics, so it will be restored to the state it was in the 1950s. It is an amazing place, and the research tells us so much.
But it is not being left to nature. And it is not a restoration of the original condition. It is an aesthetic that exists beyond our usual concepts of wilderness. We have a place where wolves can hunt moose, and scientists can study them with relative ease.
And that practicality trumps Gaia and probably will every time.
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