Facing fate
Science comes down in favor of red wolf, but some consider its future 'dire'
An old Ozarks inhabitant, the red wolf,
is down to a few dozen animals hanging
on in
North Carolina, and its future remains
uncertain, even as two scientific
conclusions —
one recent and the other building
throughout the past 20 years — speak in
favor of
making a last-ditch effort to keep it on the ark.
The red wolf once roamed throughout the
Southeastern United States, from the
Atlantic and Gulf coasts into Arkansas and
southern Missouri. It may be the only wolf
unique to the United States. By World War II
, it had been wiped out east of the Mississippi
River, and only two viable populations existed
in the wild: one in the Ozark/Ouachita
mountains, the other in parts of Louisiana
and Texas. That Ozark population was the
next to fall.
Through the 1970s, those last survivors in
Louisiana and Texas were removed from
the wild and sent to captive breeding
programs, and their offspring became
the genesis for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
o for red wolf reintroduction.
Hybridization ‘infrequent’
One critical advantage that region had over
other parts of the red wolf’s former range
was that its coyote population was “virtually
zero at the time,” according to the U.S. Fish
and Wildlife Service. However, coyotes,
which had continually been expanding eastward
, soon moved in. The fear has always been
that the few remaining red wolves introduced
in the wild would mate with coyotes —
particularly if the population was small enough —
and that the red wolf would hybridize itself out
of existence.
However, a new study — published just last
month in the journal Evolutionary Applications —
challenges those assumptions and concluded that
“active management and natural isolating mechanisms
may be limiting intermixing” in the recovery area.
Sampling scat in 2010, scientists found evidence
that “hybrids composed only 4 percent of individuals
within this landscape despite co-occurrence of the
two species.”
At the time, the red wolf population was put at 110 to
130 by the USFWS.
The study’s authors concluded hybridization was
infrequent and wrote, “From the red wolf perspective,
our results disprove the common perception that red
wolves have been consumed by a genetic swarm
and no longer exist as a distinct genetic entity in
North Carolina. ... This is especially pertinent as
the USFWS has been faced with calls to modify
or even cancel the red wolf program due to a
perceived lack of success.”
The study is one of a number of pieces affirming
that the USFWS program in North Carolina worked,
despite claims by critics who said the two species
were interbreeding.
The finding helps remove a barrier to restoration
of the red wolf throughout other parts of its historic
range, including, perhaps, the Ozarks, which at least
one previous scientific study identified as a possible
top candidate for restoration.
Role of apex predators
The second development — the one building throughout
20 years — is the growing body of evidence concluding
that apex predators play a vital role regulating natural
communities, a role that man has not been successful
in filling. In the absence of large predators, these
communities adopt even destructive behaviors.
Did you know that in some areas without large predators
to regulate them, raccoons, which are nocturnal, have
become daytime feeders, nonchalantly wandering
farther and farther away from sheltered areas to feed,
their young not even raising their heads to survey their
environment anymore for danger?
The most famous laboratory for the impact of the
wolf has been Yellowstone, where they were
reintroduced in 1995, but it is a bit of a unique
environment. A better example for the rest of the
country might be studies coming out of Wisconsin,
which found that the natural recovery of the gray wolf
population there changed the browsing habits of
deer in positive ways. Wisconsin, like Missouri and
many other states, has a deer population that may
even exceed what existed in pre-settlement times.
Each wolf only eats an estimated 15 to 18 deer per
year, so their impact on the state’s deer population
(there are fewer than 1,000 wolves in Wisconsin)
is negligible, compared with hunter harvests and
even weather patterns.
In the absence of wolves, deer in Wisconsin consume
tree seedlings, shrubs and forbs (wildflowers and
other leafy plants), avoiding ferns, grasses and sedges
, and the result has been a decline in the former,
including rare and sensitive species, and an
increase in the latter. With wolf recovery, those
altered deer browsing habits led to a 70 percent
increase on average in the percent of cover of
forbs and a 43 percent increase in species richness.
There was similarly dramatic increase in seedlings
and shrubs and a nearly 50 percent decrease in ferns.
Another study found that in areas of Wisconsin
with large wolf populations, the proportion of saplings
browsed was lower by 85 percent, sapling height
more than doubled, forb species richness doubled
and the recruitment of maples was 24 times as high
as comparable areas with lower wolf densities.
Meanwhile, the potential impact the red wolf has on
its environment has not been investigated to the
degree of its larger cousin, in part because the red
wolf population is so small and in part because the
focus has been on recovery.
But there is some evidence that red wolves could
have the same kind of top-down pressure in their
communities, given that red wolves restored to
barrier islands as part of the recovery proces
s aided the sea turtle population by helping control
the population of raccoons, which eat sea turtles eggs.
‘Dire point’
All of this science is happening just as Tara Zuardo
argues that the future of the former Ozarks inhabitant
has never been more dire. Last summer, the U.S.
Fish and Wildlife Service announced a full review
of its red wolf program. It said it was not terminating
its recovery effort, but it did suspend reintroduction of
red wolves into the wild while scientists gathered
additional information. The decision still has not been
announced but could come later this year.
Zuardo is an attorney for the Animal Welfare Institute,
one of seven conservation groups arguing that
because of pressure from politicians and some
private landowners in the recovery area, that the
federal agency is “deliberately abandoning the red
wolf program.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says no decision
has been made, but those conservation groups
recently filed an emergency petition demanding
increased protection efforts on behalf of the 40 or
50 surviving red wolves believed to still exist in
the recovery area of eastern North Carolina.
The conservation groups also want red wolf
populations introduced at two other sites to
rebuild the population and listed a number of
candidates throughout the Southeast that Zuardo
says are supported by science. Neither Missouri
nor Arkansas were on the list, despite that fact
that the Ozarks was among the last known
refuges for the animal.
Meanwhile, North Carolina lawmakers recently
called on the federal agency to end the red wolf
recovery effort in that state, leaving the most
endangered canid in the world without a home.
Discontinuing the program could be a hard sell,
given that the USFWS has invested millions of
dollars in the recovery over decades, and it
would be a high-profile failure for an animal
whose status as an endangered species
predates the Endangered Species Act. Whatever
happens, Missouri and Arkansas need to be
watching.
The red wolf evolved in tandem with the Ozarks’
rhythm of hill and hollow and oak-hickory forests,
and its extirpation from the region surely altered
the natural balance. Man-made efforts to find
and maintain that balance will remain costly,
ineffective and fraught with unintended
consequences.
Right now, voices in North Carolina are dominating
the debate. Granted, they are on the front lines of
the recovery effort, but they are not the only region
that could suffer if the red wolf is allowed to b
ecome extinct and if a natural mechanism for
keeping nature in balance is removed forever.
Aldo Leopold, whose ties to Wisconsin and
Missouri are deep, offers a lesson worth
remembering: “The last word in ignorance is
the man who says of an animal or plant,
‘What good is it?’ If the land mechanism
as a whole is good, then every part is good,
whether we understand it or not. If the biota,
in the course of aeons, has built something
we like but do not understand, then who but
a fool would discard seemingly useless parts? T
o keep every cog and wheel is the first precaution
of intelligent tinkering.”
Final howl
In 1950, a small female taken near Branson
became the last red wolf on record in Missouri
. In 1964, a world authority on wolves, Douglas
Pimlot, came to Arkansas to evaluate the status
of red wolves. He played recordings of wolf howls
around the state and listened for responses. He
got two. One was from the far southwest corner
of the state, part of that population that still survived
in Texas and Louisiana. The other came from the
Boston Mountains.
With that, the howl of the red wolf faded
from the Ozarks.
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