"The Great Dying of the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas resulted in a human-driven global impact on the Earth System in the two centuries prior to the Industrial Revolution"............."The arrival of Europeans in the Americas in 1492 CE marks the onset of disease epidemics resulting in the loss of up to 90% of indigenous people living in the Americas over the subsequent century"............"There is wide agreement about the effects of diseases and epidemics associated with European contact".............."The first well-documented, widespread epidemic in what was to become New Mexico was smallpox in 1636"..............."Shortly thereafter, measles entered the area, and many Pueblos lost as many as a quarter of their inhabitants"................."After the founding of Spanish settlements and missions, there was substantially more contact, and throughout the 17th century, epidemic disease was repeatedly imported"................"It should be noted that Osteologic data demonstrate that native groups were most definitely not living in a pristine, disease-free environment before contact".........."Diseases such as treponemiasis and tuberculosis were already present in the New World, along with diseases such as tularemia, giardia, rabies, amebic dysentery, hepatitis, herpes, pertussis, and poliomyelitis, although the prevalence of almost all of these was probably low in any given group"............."Old World diseases that were not present in the Americas until contact include bubonic plague, measles, smallpox, mumps, chickenpox, influenza, cholera, diphtheria, typhus, malaria, leprosy, and yellow fever"............. "Indians in the Americas had no acquired immunity to these infectious diseases"..............."Europeans began to colonize North America (defined here as the United States of America and Canada) after Central and South America, thus regional and continent wide estimates are largely based on archaeological evidence, tribe-by-tribe counts and environmental carrying capacities"............ "The lower range of population estimates for North America lies between 900,000 and 2.4 million, based on tribe-by-tribe counts for the period 1600 CE to mid-1800 CE"..............."The highest estimate of 18 million, established from analyzing environmental carrying capacities, has been criticized for its assumptions on food acquisition strategies".............."More recent estimates derived from geospatial interpolation of archaeological sites range between 2.8 million and 5.7 million"................."These intermediate figures are supported by a recent comprehensive regional-scale archaeological study"

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0277379118307261

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1071659/

Earth system impacts of the European arrival and Great Dying in the Americas after 1492

12/4/2018

Author links open overlay panelAlexanderKochahrisBrierleyaMark M.MaslinaSimon L.Lewis

The population of the Americas in 1492

The first population groups to arrive in North America between 20,000 and 15,000 years ago were of east Asian- and north Eurasian ancestry (e.g. Amick, 2017; Moreno-Mayar et al., 2018; Pedersen et al., 2016). The adoption of a sedentary, agricultural way of life in the Americas began 10,000–8000 BP (Piperno and Dillehay, 2008; Piperno et al., 2009). Large, complex civilizations emerged in North, Central and South America, further increasing population density, with abundant evidence for a large population living in the Americas prior to European arrival (e.g. Bolt and van Zanden, 2014; Canuto et al., 2018; Clement et al., 2015; Cook, 1998; Denevan, 1992a). However, as the epidemics spread, often ahead of the European explorers, pre-European population estimates were never formally documented in colonial censuses (Diamond, 1997; Dobyns, 1993). Hence, Native American populations were only documented in the decades after European contact, necessitating the use of indirect methods to estimate the pre-1492 population of the Americas. Here, we summarize all existing methodologies applied to reconstruct pre-contract indigenous population, and extract published regional estimates to calculate a revised hemispheric population estimate with uncertainty ranges.

2.1. Approaches to estimating the indigenous population at European arrival

Historical anthropologists and archaeologists estimate indigenous population numbers at contact by utilizing a range of documentary evidence, including sizes of armies, number of adult males, census data, tribute records, numbers of buildings, depopulation ratios, and historic clerical chronicles such as the number of baptisms and number of deaths in a community (Borah and Cook, 1960, 1969; Dobyns, 1966, 1983). The conversion from such evidence into population estimates has several limitations. Records of the sizes of armies and the sizes of settlements from just after Spanish arrival may be prone to miscounting and exaggeration (Denevan, 1992a) while the conversion from tributes to population numbers requires contentious assumptions to be made (Henige, 1998; Zambardino, 1980). These include the proportion of a population excluded from tributes, average tribute paid per house, number of people per house, conversion from goods into monetary value, spatial homogeneity of population structure and analogies to present day population structures (Borah and Cook, 1960; Sanders, 1976; Sanders et al., 1979).

Colonial census estimates are generally considered more reliable (Denevan, 1992a), but do not capture population levels before European contact (Borah and Cook, 1960). Accepting such censuses as representative of pre-contact populations led to studies from the early and mid-20th century giving very low 1492 CE population estimates (e.g. Kroeber, 1939; Rosenblat, 1954). Some estimate of the population loss on contact is necessary to provide more robust population numbers.

Archaeological data can also be used to estimate pre-contact population size, but again involves several assumptions, such as the number of houses in a settlement that are occupied at one time (Schacht, 1984). But in contrast to historical documents, new archaeological sites are regularly discovered and new and innovative multidisciplinary approaches are being applied to the data, adding new constraints on regional pre-contact population sizes (e.g. Canuto et al., 2018; Goldberg et al., 2016; Liebmann et al., 2016; Storey, 2012). Population densities can be inferred from the number of archaeological sites (Heckenberger et al., 2003), the number of archaeological features such as pottery, charcoal and fertile anthropogenic soils known as Amazonian Dark Earth (ADEs Heckenberger et al., 1999; Meggers, 2001). Expanding on this, the “habitat density method” projects well-studied local population densities to other regions with similar environmental characteristics to calculate the total population under the assumption that population densities in different locations with the same habitat are similar (e.g. Denevan, 1970, 2003; Newson, 1996). Thus, all 1492 CE population estimates require data to be combined with assumptions to arrive at estimates.

Fig. 2. Regions known to have been affected by disease outbreaks by 1600 CE and pre-Columbian land use. Disease outbreak data derives from Dobyns (1993) and Cook (1998). Land use extent is based on high densities of archaeological sites, earthworks and Amazonian Dark Earths occurrence (Clement et al., 2015; De Souza et al., 2018; McMichael et al., 2014; Whitmore and Turner, 1992). The locations of sites and records referred to in the text and later figures are also shown. 

2.2. New pre-Columbian population estimates

We summarize the existing evidence for pre-Columbian populations using seven geographical regions: the Caribbean, Mexico, Central America, the Inca Territory, Amazonia and contiguous forested area, North America and the Rest of the Americas. The Inca Territory at contact encompassed Peru, Bolivia, Ecuador, Colombia, Chile and parts of north-western Argentina; the Rest of Americas is composed of Venezuela, Uruguay, Paraguay and the rest of Argentina. We complied 129 estimates from 82 studies (Caribbean, n = 18; Mexico, n = 17; Central America, n = 23; Inca Territory, n = 26; Amazonia, n = 20; North America, n = 9; Rest of Americas, n = 6; total hemisphere, n = 10; Table 1). Below we discuss the range of estimates for each region and use them to calculate a total population estimate of the Americas in 1492 CE based on all existing data available at the time of this review.

Caribbean. The first contact between Europeans and Amerindians occurred when Columbus arrived in 1492 CE on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola (what is now Haiti and the Dominican Republic). The primary source for most modern estimates of the contact population is a contemporary eyewitness report by the Dominican friar Bartolomé de las Casas who reported a Hispaniola population of 4 million at the time of contact (Denevan, 1992a). However, studies based on this same report range from 60,000 that neglects contemporaneous reports of post-contact deaths (Verlinden, 1973, in Henige, 1978), to acknowledging some degree of depopulation with initial populations estimated at between 100,000 (Amiama, 1959; Rosenblat, 1976) and 8 million (Cook and Borah, 1971, Table S1).

The 8 million estimate has drawn criticism for the worker-to-population ratio used, the assumption of a logarithmic population decline during 1492–1496 CE, and the inclusion of a controversial tribute count from 1496 CE (Henige, 1978). Most estimates are between 300,000 and 500,000 people in the Caribbean before European contact (Córdova, 1968; Dobyns, 1966; Morison, 1948; Moya Pons, 1979; Williams, 1970).

Mexico. Europeans arrived in what is now Mexico in 1519 CE. Yet, the first comprehensive census only took place in 1568 CE, and tribute records are only available as documentary evidence from the late 1540s (Cook and Borah, 1960; Whitmore, 1991). For central Mexico (the most populous region in Mexico) a population of 25.3 million in 1519 CE has been estimated from tribute records (Borah and Cook, 1969), which would make it one of the most populous regions in the world at the time. Zambardino (1980) highlights the uncertainties in Borah and Cook's approach and arrived at a population between 2.2 and 28 million. Dobyns (1966, 1983) suggests the highest numbers, up to 52 million for central Mexico, based on an extrapolation of depopulation ratios from the Valley of Mexico. These values are higher than some estimates for all of Mexico. For the other region with a substantial pre-Columbian population, the Yucatan peninsula, estimates range between 2.3 million (historic documents, Lange, 1971) and 13 million (extrapolation from number of houses, Morley, 1968). Considering all of Mexico, the lowest estimates, which either outright reject (Rosenblat, 1954) or question the accuracy (Sanders, 1972) of the early tribute records, are between 4.5 and 6 million. Intermediate estimates are ∼16 million, based on a linear extrapolation from results of a modelling study incorporating a combination of population, agricultural and epidemiological models for the Valley of Mexico (Fig. 2, near Valle de Mezquital, Whitmore, 1991) and 17.2 million as a best-estimate based on a synthesis of previous estimates by (Denevan, 1992a). Pre-contact population estimates for central Mexico and Yucatan combined, which is considered representative for all of Mexico, range from less than 3 million to over 52 million with many at around 20 million (Table S1).

North America. Europeans began to colonize North America (defined here as the United States of America and Canada) after Central and South America, thus regional and continent wide estimates are largely based on archaeological evidence, tribe-by-tribe counts and environmental carrying capacities (Milner and Chaplin, 2010, see Table S1). The lower range of population estimates for North America lies between 900,000 and 2.4 million, based on tribe-by-tribe counts for the period 1600 CE to mid-1800 CE (Kroeber, 1939; Ubelaker, 1976, 2006). The highest estimate of 18 million, established from analysing environmental carrying capacities (Dobyns, 1983), has been criticized for its assumptions on food acquisition strategies (Milner and Chaplin, 2010). More recent estimates derived from geospatial interpolation of archaeological sites range between 2.8 million and 5.7 million (Milner and Chaplin, 2010). These intermediate figures are supported by a recent comprehensive regional-scale archaeological study (Liebmann et al., 2016).

Table 1. Population and land use at 1500 CE and 1600 CE in P08 (Pongratz et al., 2008a), HYDE 3.1 (Klein Goldewijk et al., 2010), KK10 (Kaplan et al., 2011), and this study. Also shown are their implied net global carbon uptakes as published in Pongratz et al. (2011) (for P08) and Kaplan et al. (2011) (for KK10 and HYDE 3.1) and the calculated net global carbon uptake from this study.

	P08	HYDE 3.1	KK10	This study (IQR)
Population at 1500 CE (million)	41.1	41.2	60	60.5 (44.8–78.2)
Land use per capita (ha per capita)	0.18	0.67	6.25	1.04 (0.98–1.11)
Land use area at 1500 CE (million ha)	7.5	27.7	372	61.9 (43.3–87.1)
Depopulation (%)	65%	76%	90%	90%
Population at 1600 CE (million)	14.2	9.7	6	6.1 (4.5–7.8)
Land use area at 1600 CE (million ha)	4.9	8.7	123	6.1 (4.8–7.4)
Land use change 1500–1600 CE	4	−6.9	−249.9	−55.8 (−38.5–79.7)
Net global carbon uptake (Pg C)	0.009	<0 .1="" td="">	40	7.4 (4.9–10.8)

While there was a sizeable Indian population in eastern North America prior to European contact(circa AD1500), their impact on the land was minimal..............As Harvard Forest Director David Foster and Harvard Forest Paleoecologist W. Wyatt Oswald sum up in their recent article: “LAND MANAGERS SEEKING TO EMULATE PRE-CONTACT CONDITIONS SHOULD DE-EMPHASIZE HUMAN DISTURBANCE AND FOCUS ON DEVELOPING MATURE FORESTS".........."IN AREAS WHERE GRASSLANDS AND PASTURE ARE DESIRED (FOR EXAMPLE, TO RETAIN MODERN PATTERNS OF SPECIES DIVERSITY), COLONIAL-ERA TECHNOLOGIES FOR KEEPING LAND OPEN—SUCH AS PLOWING, GRAZING, MOWING FOR HAY, AND TREE-CUTTING—SHOULD BE USED INSTEAD OF BURNING, BECAUSE THOSE ARE THE AGRICULTURAL APPROACHES THAT CREATED THEM FOUR CENTURIES AGO" ..............Bottom line is that lake bottom sediment cores of some 12,000 years ago up to the present suggest that there were not widespread human impacts on New England landscapes before the arrival of Europeans".........."Further, It is known that while Indians at times set fires to the woods, prairie and chaparral environs they occupied, Hugh Raup a plant ecologist and Director of the Harvard Forest for 21 years, writing in 1937, "noted that Indian caused fires in the northeast were uncommon and the idea that they burned the entire New England area every year. or even every 10 to 20 years “is inconceivable" ............. As pointed out by esteemed Ecological Historian Emily Russell in her 1983 study of Indian caused fires in the northeastern United States: "There is no strong evidence that Indian purposely burned large areas of the forested northeastern United States frequently"..............."The presence of Indians did, however, undoubtedly increase the frequency of fires above the low numbers caused by lightning"................ "The increase from the 'natural' situation was greatest in local areas near Indian habitations"

https://harvardmagazine.com/2020/01/natural-ecology-in-new-england

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2020/01/200122123700.htm

http://theconversation.com/native-people-did-not-use-fire-to-shape-new-englands-landscape-129429

https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.2307/1937331

New England’s Forest Primeval

by JONATHAN SHAW

1.20.2020

HAT DID THE NEW ENGLAND landscape look like before European colonizers arrived? The prevailing view among modern historians is that Native Americans engaged in widespread horticulture and used fire to keep grasslands and pasturelands open. Now a study by Harvard Forest director David Foster and colleagues, published today in Nature Sustainability, argues instead that Native Americans had very little impact on the regional landscape in that period, even when their populations were large. 

Eastern Woodland Old-Growth Forest

Written accounts of Native Americans cultivating the land in New England overstate the importance of agriculture in the pre-contact period, according to a new study. Here, an engraving by Theodor De Bry, after a drawing by Jacques Le Moyne, depicts Timucua Indians at Fort Caroline, a French settlement established in what is now Florida, hoeing and sowing seeds, including beans and maize. The image may be the only contemporaneous visual depiction by Europeans showing the importance of agriculture to Native Americans in the New World.

Courtesy of the Lewis Ansbacher Map Collection, permanently housed in the Morris Ansbacher Map Room, Jacksonville (Florida) Public Library.

The study reconstructs climate and vegetation in New England during the past 10,000 years, and draws as well on extensive archaeological evidence. It’s significant, Foster explained in an interview, because the relatively new belief that humans have always interfered in natural ecologies has been used to guide conservation practices in North America and elsewhere. The paper argues that this is a mistake, and that in the specific case of New England, “land managers seeking to emulate pre-contact conditions should deemphasize human disturbance and focus on developing mature forests.”

 In areas where grasslands and pasture are desired (for example, to retain modern patterns of species diversity), colonial-era technologies for keeping land open—such as plowing, grazing, mowing for hay, and tree-cutting—should be used instead of burning, because those are the agricultural approaches that created them four centuries ago. The larger implication is that the history of human involvement in ecologies elsewhere in North America and around the world may need to be re-evaluated. 

The study authors analyzed pollen and charcoal residues in sediment cores (above) from lake bottoms to learn about changes in vegetation and the severity of forest fires in New England since the end of the last glaciation.Photograph courtesy of the Harvard Forest

Paleoecologist W. Wyatt Oswald, first author on the paper and an associate of Harvard Forest, used cores extracted from lake-bottom sediments to reconstruct prevailing patterns of vegetation from about 11,700 years ago, when the last glaciation ended. By analyzing pollen trapped in the sediment, he discovered which plants dominated the landscape; charcoal residues indicated the extent of burning. “When you actually look at various lines of evidence,” Oswald explained in an interview, “there is nothing to suggest that there were widespread human impacts on New England landscapes before the arrival of Europeans.”

The research team collected sediment cores from 21 lakes across southern New England. Analysis revealed that pines dominated the landscape until 10,000 years ago. Then, as temperatures increased during the subsequent 2,000 years, oak forests began to appear, and elevated levels of pollen from ragweed and grasses indicate the presence of open land or an open forest structure maintained by fire, a change that was driven by the dry climate. Human populations at this point remained small. When moisture and temperature began increasing some 8,000 years ago, beech and hickory species joined the oaks, while signs of ragweed and grasses declined to almost nothing—indications that a closed-canopy hardwood forest had taken over the landscape, and that there was little fire, despite a burgeoning human population.

Archaeological evidence tells a similar story of minimal human impacts on the ecosystem, one that accords with Native American cultural beliefs about living in harmony with the land. A spike in the Native American population that occurred from 1,500 to 500 years ago “has often been attributed to the emergence of horticulture,” the authors note, “especially the planting of maize.” But the archaeological evidence cited in the paper reveals very little sign of farming. There is, on the other hand, abundant evidence for subsistence practices such as hunting, fishing, shell-fishing, and plant-gathering. Elizabeth Chilton, an archaeologist and former assistant professor at Harvard who is one of the co-authors of the paper, quickly established during her time in Cambridge that cultivated corn, squash, and beans were present in New England before contact, but weren’t widely used until Europeans arrived.


The study suggests that open land in New England should be maintained using the same colonial-era practices that created it, such as grazing and mowing, rather than burning.
Photograph courtesy of the Harvard Forest

“People were still very much living off of the land,” said Foster, “which is why they congregated on the coast and in river bottoms” where there are so many resources. “That’s a shock for most people, because it’s so ingrained in us that the native people were planting corn.” It may be part of the national mythology, but “In fact, there’s no archaeological support for widespread use of agriculture at all.”

The Historical Fallacy

THE IDEA THAT Native Americans engaged in widespread management of the landscape before European contact appears to have gained credence among scholars with a 1953 paper, “The Indian as an ecological factor in northeastern forests,” by anthropologist Gordon Day. Historian William Cronon’s Changes in the Land popularized the ideas that Native Americans were engaged in widespread horticulture, and used prescribed burns to keep grasslands and pasturelands open. Cronon relied on the accounts of early European explorers such as Thomas Morton, who described Native Americans setting such fires twice yearly, to conclude that:

Here was the reason that southern [New England] forests were so open and parklike; not because the trees naturally grew thus, but because the Indians preferred them so. As William Wood [in another early account] observed, the fire “consumes all the underwood and rubbish which otherwise would overgrow the country, making it unpassable, and spoil their much affected hunting.” The result was a forest of large, widely spaced trees, few shrubs, and much grass and herbage. 

Foster himself recalled embracing these ideas about native burning to manage the land during his undergraduate studies, and noted that “Bill Cronon is such a marvelously accomplished writer that this idea has been taken up and applied widely. Books such as 1491 and various others on the ‘ecological Indian’ have really made this into something, such that modern-day land managers and the forest service and state agencies and conservation organizations—all have embraced this entirely—without any compelling prehistorical data.” As the study’s authors write:

Humans are now inferred to have driven ecosystem dynamics for millennia across much of the globe, including many areas formerly interpreted as pristine or dominated by mature forests.  This new perspective has led to the conclusion that many valued characteristics of historical and modern landscapes, such as high levels of plant and animal diversity—including the occurrence of many rare and endangered species—may represent legacies of earlier cultural activities. In many forested or potentially forested landscapes, a wide array of openland habitats, including grasslands, shrublands, heathlands, and early successional forests have been attributed to purposeful landscape management by ancient people.

David R. Foster (left) and W. Wyatt Oswald prepare to take a core sample of sediment from a lake in southern New England.Photograph courtesy of the Harvard Forest

“This human-centered interpretation” has led to conservation management practices that include “the prescription of disturbances, especially fire,” as well as clear-cutting and other mechanical treatments to mimic the inferred activities of ancient peoples. In New England, where woodlands are often referred to as “the asbestos forest,” there are no fire-dependent species. “There are some species that will survive fire better than others,” Foster said, “but there are none that require fire in order to be maintained,” as there are in other parts of the country.

The present study, with its assembled empirical evidence from archaeologists, ecologists, and paleoclimatologists, is the culmination of a series of National Science Foundation grants on which Foster has been the principal investigator, combined with work done at the Harvard Forest as part of a long-term ecological research program. “We have been gradually building the number of sites,” said Foster, “and building a stronger and stronger case. Eventually, we were able to pull together the work that’s represented here.”

Their inescapable conclusion is that climate, not people, largely controlled fire severity in New England during the period since the end of the last glaciation. The paper’s conservation message is that “land managers seeking to emulate pre-contact conditions should deemphasize human disturbance and focus on developing mature forests: those seeking to maintain openlands should apply the agricultural approaches”—such as grazing, plowing, and mowing for hay—“that initiated them four centuries ago.” 

We have know for some time that both Gray and Eastern Wolves will dine on berries and kill fish during certain times of the year to augment their hoofed browser(deer, elk, moose, bison, caribou) and beaver diet........Newly discovered is that the Wolves of Voyageurs National Park in Minnesota readily also feed their newborn pups of the year regurgitated blueberries.........Interesting to know that Wolves may be more adaptable than previously thought in enjoying meat, fish and fruit—Similar to their Coyote cousins!

httpshttps://www.mprnews.org/story/2020/02/12/new-research-from-northern-minn-shows-wolves-feed-berries-to-their-young://

New research from northern Minn. shows wolves feed berries to their young

Dan Kraker

Duluth

February 12, 2020 1:56 p.m.

A new study shows that blueberries may be a more valuable food source for wolves in the boreal forests of far northern Minnesota than previously appreciated.

Courtesy of the University of Minnesota

View video of Voyageurs Wolf eating blue berries

www.facebook.com/VoyageursWolfProject/videos/185068582590599/

New research into the surprising summer eating habits of northern Minnesota wolves known to be fond of beaver, fish and blueberries has now also documented wolves feeding those berries to their pups.

The finding, published this week in the journal Wildlife Society Bulletin, suggests that wild blueberries may be a more valuable food source for wolves in the boreal forests of far northern Minnesota than previously appreciated.

In the summer of 2017, Austin Homkes, a field biologist with the Voyageurs Wolf Project — a collaboration between Voyageurs National Park and the University of Minnesota — trekked to a beaver meadow just south of the park where researchers believed wolves had recently killed prey.

As he drew near, he saw five pups gathered around an adult wolf in the center of the meadow, about 100 meters away. He saw the pups lick at the adult’s mouth for about 30 seconds, and then watched as the wolf regurgitated food for the pups three times on to the ground.

A half hour after the wolves left, he approached and found several small piles of chewed and whole wild blueberries. While wolves are known to regurgitate deer and other meat to feed their young, this is the first documentation of a wolf feeding pups berries or fruit of any kind.

The finding is significant because “that means that wolves are getting some energetic value out of consuming blueberries like this,” explained Tom Gable, a Ph.D. student at the University of Minnesota who leads the Voyageurs Wolf Project.

Researchers have known for some time that wolves eat wild blueberries and other fruit to supplement their largely meat-based diet. In fact, Gable and his colleagues have found that blueberries can make up to 83 percent of the July diet of the eight wolf packs they study in and around Voyageurs National Park.

It could mean that wolves are simply taking advantage of the blueberries growing abundantly and close together.

“And so for an animal like a wolf, they’re expending very little energy eating those berries,” Gable said. “And so it's possible that just sitting in a berry patch, not really moving a whole lot, is a better strategy than running around your territory looking for a fawn or a beaver in the middle of the summer.”

The findings could suggest that wolves are using berries to meet their pups’ minimum food needs, Gable said. Or, he said, maybe berries could help pups survive the lulls when adults are unable to kill beaver or deer.

Gable said as researchers learn more about wolves’ summer predation behavior, including how much time they spend foraging berries, they hope to better understand the significance berries play in wolves’ diets, and whether those berries reduce the number of prey — mainly deer fawns and beavers — that wolves kill in July and August.

In conjunction with the newly-published research, the Voyageurs Wolf Project also released what they believe is a first-ever video showing wolves eating berries.

Using 25 cameras, researchers recorded wolves stripping blueberry bushes. Gable said the video provides irrefutable evidence that wolves do indeed consume berries. “There’s been some skepticism about whether or not wolves really do this,” he said.

For the past five years, researchers have placed GPS collars on wolves from in and around the park. They collect location data from the animals every 20 minutes. That allows them to see where wolves stop long enough to eat. The location information helps researchers place cameras.

The technology has led to the surprising discovery that wolves hunt fish in shallow streams. They also stalk beaver which can make up as much as 42 percent of a wolf’s diet around the park