Wolf Reintroduction and the American Marten

Questions regarding the Flora and Fauna on the island.

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Wolf Reintroduction and the American Marten

Post by johnhens »

From the IRNP FB page:

You may have heard about the wolves of Isle Royale National Park, who, alongside moose, form an ecologically fascinating predator-prey system - the subject of the longest ever predator-prey research study which began in 1958! There’s lots of natural variation in wolf and moose population in this isolated system, but by 2018, there were only two wolves left on the island. The National Park Service began wolf reintroduction in 2018 and 2019, bringing some wolves to the island in order to bolster their population and maintain this ecologically important system. In collaboration with the National Park Service, Dr. Jonathan Pauli and his graduate students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison asked how wolf reintroduction would affect other carnivores on the island.
The researchers are especially interested to find out how the marten population is responding to the wolf reintroduction. The American marten (Martes americana) population on Isle Royale was wiped out in 1917, but recent studies found that martens recolonized Isle Royale in 1980s or early 1990s.
To study the effects of wolf repatriation, the researchers followed the same sampling protocol before the wolves were introduced and two years following the reintroduction. The researchers collected samples of wolf, marten, and fox scat along trails across the island. They are using these samples to examine animal diets and to look at population size and genetics of each species. They also used hair traps to non-invasively collect hair samples, which will be used for stable isotope studies to learn more about animal diet, habitat, and movement.
The full results of this study will be available soon. This information will help resource managers understand the impact of wolf reintroduction and know how to best support populations of all of Isle Royale’s carnivores, big and small!
For more information, check out these articles:
https://queticosuperior.org/.../martens ... meback.../
https://www.wiscontext.org/martens-puzzle-scientists...
For a more scientific read, take a look at this journal article:
https://www.researchgate.net/.../327187776_Dynamic...
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