-We're good. All right.
Hello everyone.
This is Ranger Jake here in Yellowstone national park.
I want to welcome you again to our series of live broadcasts
that we're doing throughout the month of March
to commemorate 25 years of wolves in Yellowstone national park.
A couple of things if you missed last week's broadcast,
we had senior wildlife biologist Doug Smith
talk about the reintroduction.
We can drop a link in the comments.
If you miss that we encourage you to check that out.
In general, the broadcast flow, what we'll do is I'll introduce
the speakers.
I'll jump behind the camera I'll be monitoring your questions
and comments
and when the speakers are done talking,
I'll go ahead and try to ask and answer
as many of those questions with the speakers as we can.
Before we get started, I want to give you
a little sense of where we're at.
We're here along the rescue Creek trail
in the North part of the park.
You can see we got a little bit of snow last night
so spring weather can kind of be iffy.
You don't know if it's going to be a warm sunny day or cold,
it can usually be both.
The road from the North entrance of the park so Gardner Montana
is over here.
You drive into the park up towards Bunsen Peak.
Just to give you a little sense of where we're at.
With that, I'm going to go ahead and introduce both of our speakers
so if you guys want to join on camera here,
you can jump in the middle.
Are we all fitting in here?
First to start off with, we're joined with a wildlife research associate
Kira Cassidy over here
and then wildlife biologists Dan Stahler.
Kira started as a volunteer in 2007 with the project
and she moved into her current position in 2012.
I got that right.
She's got a master's degree from the University of Minnesota
where she focused on wolf territoriality.
Her position is a part of the partnership
between Yellowstone Forever which is our nonprofit partner
and the National Park Service.
You can see they're dressed a little differently
and that's because cure is a part of Yellowstone Forever.
Dan, he started on the project in 1997,
moved into his current position in 2002.
He's also the project lead for the Yellowstone Cougar project.
He also studies mountain lions in the park.
He also helps lead the elk research program.
Holds a masters from University of Vermont
and a PhD from UCLA
and he studied Yellowstone predator scavenger relationships
as well as population genetics, social dynamics,
and behavior of Yellowstone wolves respectively from those two places.
That was a mouthful. Did I get all that correct?
-You did. Thanks, Jake.
-With that Kira and I are going to jump behind the camera.
We'll let Dan take it away and thanks so much for joining us.
-All right thanks, Jake.
Welcome, everyone.
I'm Dan Stahler, wildlife biologist here for Yellowstone National Park
and I've been studying wolves here for the last 23 years.
Today, we're going to be sharing with you
just a few of the many scientific discoveries
we've made about wolves since their return.
One of the really unique aspects of our research program here
is we've had the ability to study long-term data on wolves
and their impacts on this ecosystem.
It's a whole variety of topics from wolf biology and behavior,
predator-prey interactions, genetics, disease ecology interactions
with scavengers and other carnivores.
Collectively, this information provided a lot
of unique understanding about wolves.
Coupled with the fact that we have one
of the most observable wolf populations in the world,
this research program has really added
a whole new breadth of understanding about this carnivore.
Why is that knowledge important?
That knowledge is important because wolves are controversial.
They still challenge our society's views and values
about wildlife and nature.
There's a lot of misinformation out there about wolves.
Now, many of us have opinions about wolves
but there are a few substitutes for scientific data
and long-term understanding to tell us the truth
about these animals.
Right now we are in the middle of our 50th winter predation study.
Two times a winter, early and late, we do a 30-day study
where the goal is to understand predation
and we try to understand how often wolves kill,
what they select for pray and how much food they consume.
Predation is important for two main reasons.
First, predation is a powerful ecological force
that has shaped biological communities
around the world for the last 500 million years.
Now many of the traits that we admire in animals such as the keen senses
of an elk,
the speed of a pronghorn, the strength of a cougar,
the endurance of a Wolf these are all shaped by predator
and prey interactions.
We also know that predators are important parts
of healthy ecosystems.
By hunting vulnerable prey which is often the young
the old the weak and the sick, wolves are able to help maintain
healthy populations of their prey species.
In doing so, this also facilitates biodiversity
and many other species communities in the ecosystem.
It also helps transfer energy
and nutrients throughout the food web.
A second important reason about predation
and why we want to understand
it is the National Park Service mission
is to restore natural processes and native species.
It's paramount we have a good understanding
of what role wolves have in this ecosystem
and how they might influence elk, bison, and other species.
Now we study wolves using a combination
of old school field biology the power of observation
with cutting edge technology such as GPS callers
and tracking callers.
Here's an example of two of these colors.
This is a VHF color and this is a GPS collar.
You can see the worn dirty aspect of this collar.
This was on wolf 779 and she died recently
and this is her collar.
This is a GPS collar and what you see here
is the battery along the bottom.
The top is the part that communicates with the satellite.
We can use these callers to track wolves throughout the population.
Now each winter helicopter dart handful of wolves in each pack
to try to maintain contact with that pack.
In doing so, we can track their movements
we can study their survival, their reproduction,
their pack dynamics and importantly, we can study their predation.
Right now we have crews in the field
dedicated hardworking biologists sunup to sundown
following wolf packs around for 30 days trying to document
how often they kill, what prey they select
and how much food they consume.
We also get a whole host of behavioral information
about how they interact with each other
and other species on the landscape.
We also conduct the same monitoring from an airplane,
a small fixed-wing airplane where we can fly
all the packs in the park and determine on a given day
whether they had to kill or not.
Third, we used the GPS collars which fitted to wolves
will collect an hourly point,
collect the data, send it through a satellite
where we can gather the data once a week.
Look at clustered locations on the landscape
where the wolves have spent time and then we send in our crews
to search those clusters and that allows us
to find prey remains.
Combined, this becomes one of the more valuable
and accurate methods by which we can document predation
and our wolves.
When we get to a wolf kill, we examine the site,
we look for signs of why that animal may have been killed.
We document the prey, species, the age, and the sex
and we're looking for any of the bones to indicate
nutritional condition or health of that animal
at time of death.
For example, here is collections from a wolf killed.
Here you see a lower leg bone of a wolf killed elk
and you can see this large mass of calcified bone
in this growth indicating that this animal had broken
his lower leg.
This is what a healthy lower leg bone should look like in an animal
and this is one that wolf selected.
We look for clues of what have made that animal vulnerable to predation.
We also find aspects of an animal's age
should be key to its vulnerability.
Here is a lower mandible of a cow elk.
You can see along this mandible where these molars and premolars
are heavily worn.
This is an old cow elk in her late teens
and she was selected probably because of her older age,
slower, more vulnerable to predation than a prime age cow.
You can see that teeth were there which influences
her ability to get nutrients and to support
a healthy body condition.
Now, one of the important things that we've learned
by studying wolf predation patterns
and it's really important to understand
about these carnivores is that they need vulnerable prey
to be successful.
Vulnerability is key and vulnerability manifests itself
in many different ways.
What we find, for example, is a bull elk in late winter
this time of the year who's exhausted as fat reserves
and may get bogged down in deep snow is more vulnerable
to predation by wolves
than that same bull elk in early winter.
If he was in prime healthy condition and he were to stand his ground
against a pack of wolves, he's less likely to be killed.
A prime-age cow and Yellowstone between the ages of two
and about 12 or 13 is virtually invincible
to wolf predation.
However, her newborn elk calf in the summer is quite vulnerable
to predation by wolves, cougars, and bears.
We also find that the average age of a wolf killed cow elk is 14.
These are older senescent older animals
that are less likely to survive long-term,
their survival rates go down.
They're no longer producing calves every year.
We find wolves being selective at different times of the year
at different prey species of age and sex combination to reflect
vulnerability.
That's one of the biggest misunderstanding
about wolves.
Many believe that there
are these incredibly outstanding efficient hunters,
super killers that can kill any time and anything they want
and they kill for fun.
That's simply not true.
They do not have that luxury.
There are limits the wolf hunting ability
that's shaped by their biology.
Imagine running up to a 500-pound cow elk
a 750-pound bull elk with dangerous weapons on his antlers
or 2,000 bull bison and your only way to get a food
or a meal for that day is to reach out and grab onto it
with your mouth.
It's extremely dangerous and difficult to do this.
In fact, when we look at hunting success
over thousands of kills that we've observed
of wolves hunting elk and interactions between wolves
in their prey and with elk, we find they're only successful
between five and 15% of the time when they're hunting adult elk.
That's a very inefficient predator when you look at it.
That limit to their hunting ability is really important to understand.
Now they can overcome some of those limits
to hunting ability because of their group hunting behavior
and they can benefit by working as a team.
What Yellowstone has taught us is that when a pack of wolves
are hunting,
there's a division of labor and we've learned by watching
individuals of known age and sex that when they hunt elk,
we find the two to three-year-old wolves
are the best hunters.
They have that unique combination of age and experience
and they're the ones that are most proficient
at selecting out and calling out a vulnerable slower animal
from the herd.
The younger pups are usually watching and following along
learning to become a proficient hunter
and the older wolves ages six and above,
have lower predatory performance.
They're less successful.
That's because the life history of a wolf is relatively short,
they don't live that long and by the time
a wolf reaches age six and above, they start slowing down,
so they hold back effort.
Those two to three-year-olds are key to their hunting success.
Then you see body size being important,
the large alpha male might come in or large adult males come in
that are 20% larger than the females
and to use that power and strength to pull
that animal down.
That's how wolves can overcome some of those limits
to their hunting ability.
When we look at food habits in Yellowstone,
we find that they're primarily focusing on elk.
90% of their diet in winter is elk.
In summertime, they start using a little bit more bison and deer
and it's about 80% elk.
The rest is made up of those other prey items.
When they select for elk, they do so based
on those different vulnerabilities of age and sex
as I mentioned before,
they focus more on calf elk in the summer
and in the fall because they're slower
and smaller than the adults.
In the wintertime, late wintertime, they tend to focus on bull elk
because of their weaker condition compared to the cows.
We see all these different patterns that Yellowstone has taught us
through our long-term research.
Now, when we look at kill rate in wolves,
and that is the frequency at which they kill animals,
we find that that kill rate is determined by a number of factors,
how large the wolf pack is,
what size of the prey animal there are.
Are they killing an elk calf or, are they killing an adult bison?
Then we look at the role of season to affect kill rate,
they tend to consume more biomass in late winter.
They consume less biomass in the summer,
in the fall when prey are in better condition.
Their yearly cycle of obtaining food is influenced
by these different patterns and prey vulnerability.
We also see an important role of scavengers.
When a wolf makes a kill, it's providing
an important food resource to many other species
in the ecosystem.
Ravens, golden eagles, bald eagles, magpies, foxes, coyotes, black bears,
grizzly bears and hundreds of species of invertebrates
that might come in into the soils and benefit.
That's part of that food web and that nutrient expansion
throughout the ecosystem.
All these factors influence competition for the food resource
and how much food that wolves consume.
Again, one of the highlights of our research here is understanding
those unique patterns of a wolf hunting behavior,
the risk that's involved.
I remember observing the alpha female of the Mollie Pack
down in Pelican Valley during a hunt of a bison
getting kicked,
thrown into the air having to go off while the rest of her pack
tried to take down that bison to feed the pack
and she subsequently died from her injuries.
I remember another time Doug Smith and I going into the field
and collecting and investigating the death of the alpha male
of the Geode Pack 294.
It was in May, he was trying to provision and feed pups
and he had been kicked by an elk and died.
These are all the challenges that wolves face every day
in their attempt to find food.
Now, ultimately, what we're trying to understand is what impact
are wolves having on elk?
Now, there are six to seven elk herds that are primarily
using Yellowstone National Park seasonally,
20,000 to 30,000 elk between all those herds.
Our main research program focuses on the northern herd in Yellowstone.
When wolves came back to this ecosystem,
they were highly abundant, artificially high
because there had not been thought predators like wolves
and cougars for over 70 years.
Wolves came into a landscape full of abundant food
with lots of vulnerable animals.
What we found is that in those early years,
wolves had quite very little to actually contribute
to that initial decline.
What happened at the time when wolves came back to Yellowstone
simultaneous to that, cougars had recolonized the park,
another top predator of elk,
grizzly bears and black bear numbers were growing in robust
and human hunting just outside the park on that elk herd
which was designed that hunting season to reduce
the number of elk all came together to play a role
in the decline of elk on the Northern Range.
Then you add on severe winters, you add on severe drought,
these are all conditions of the landscape
that have occurred since the wolves have returned.
Wolves have definitely been a major player in influencing
populations of elk in the Northern Range elk herd,
but they've been one of multiple factors to be involved
and part of our role is to understand and tease out
what those relative effects are.
Today, we have a very healthy elk herd
that stabilize somewhere between 6,000 and 8,000 elk.
Our wolf numbers, cougar numbers, and bear numbers are robust
but seemingly also stabilize in relationship
to that food availability
and we have what we believe is a much healthier ecosystem
with all the players back on the landscape.
The wolves, the cougars, the bears, and elk are thriving
and living amongst these carnivores because they're able
to adapt to that predation risk as they have for thousands of years.
One of the final points is that part of the success
of wolves relies on their adaptive value
of social grouping and living in packs.
That's what Kira is going to talk about next, it's part of that role,
that wolf biology and social dynamics plays
in the success of these animals.
Thank you. -Awesome.
Thanks, Dan.
All right, Kira, you're up. -Thanks, Dan.
-No pressure. -That was fantastic.
[laughs]
As Dan mentioned, we use radio collars
to track the wolves.
Right now, we have about two or three radio collars
on each pack if it's an average size pack.
There are a few packs that are really huge
that we have a couple more radio collars on,
just so we can find them a bit easier.
Every once in a while, a radio-collared wolf
will die or disperse.
Once in a while, a battery will go out.
We try and keep a little bit of backup in there.
We track those radio collars from a fixed-wing aircraft
and also from the ground.
They each have their own unique frequency
and so we know which wolf we're looking for at any given time.
We are incredibly lucky here in Yellowstone
because not only do we have the ability to track
the animals with the radio collars, but we have these huge,
wide-open valleys.
For some of you who have been here before,
you probably have heard of Lamar Valley
or Hayden Valley or the Blacktail Plateau.
These places are crucial to be able to collect data on the behavior
of the wolves.
While we might track one wolf that has a radio collar,
what we actually end up seeing is a whole pack
and we can see the pack composition.
Sometimes, if we get a really great look,
we can see how many pups they have,
how many pups survived through the winter.
Great information on the interactions between wolves,
interactions with prey, as Dan talked about,
interactions with every other animal on the landscape
and with each other, of course.
Because we're able to see them so often and see that behavior
and see these somewhat rare things that go on in a wolf life,
hunting or fighting other packs,
we actually get to recognize individuals sometimes
throughout their entire life.
I would say, the best example right now is the alpha female
of the Wapiti Lake Pack.
She is about to turn 10 years old, which is exceptionally long-lived
for a wolf.
They generally only lived to be about three or four years old
but she is turned with age pure white, just like her mother,
just like her grandmother and great grandmother even.
Several generations of that same genetic linkage
to that unique look that we can recognize
through her whole life.
Now, one of the things that I find the most interesting
about wolves is the fact that they live in these huge groups.
Their families, generally, the structure is usually
a dominant male and a dominant female leading
the pack and they have pups in subsequent years
but sometimes there are also aunts, uncles and cousins
and they can all be raised together.
Every once in a while, we have actually documented
an unrelated wolf joining a pack too, an adoptee.
I see that as if some of you have a family friend
that you consider your uncle.
They're not technically related to you,
but they're very close and part of the family
for that reason.
Now, group living is actually pretty rare
among mammals and birds.
It only makes up about 2% or 3% of species out there.
We don't feel like it's rare because we're one of those species.
Humans also live in these family groups
and it's very similar to the way that the wolf is set up structurally.
The average wolf pack in Yellowstone right now is about 10 wolves
give or take.
That's usually our average whenever we do our official count
in the mid-winter.
The largest pack right now is 19 wolves,
that's the Wapiti Lake Pack led by that pure white alpha female.
The largest pack we've ever recorded was 37 wolves in late 2001,
that was the Druid Peak Pack.
We haven't seen anything even close to that.
That pack didn't last for very long before they split up
into actually four different groups
but that is the largest pack that we have ever recorded.
-You want to open it up for some questions?
-Yes. -All right.
One of the questions in here was talking about observing wolves,
you use helicopters and planes.
What effect does that have on wolves in the park?
-That's a great question.
We use a fixed-wing aircraft to fly over the wolves
and we try and do it pretty often in the winter
during the winter studies that Dan referred to.
We actually try to fly every day that the weather is good
for a 30 day period.
We usually end up flying for about half of those days.
Flights are concentrated in the winter.
We spread them out a bit in the summer,
maybe fly once every week or two
but it seems to not really affect the wolves too much.
They ignore the plane once they get used to it.
When we fly over pups when they're pretty young,
two, three and four months old, they might look up at it.
I think they think it's like a really loud Raven or something.
Once they noticed that their mom and their dad and the other adults
in the pack ignore it, they don't really have any problem
they start to ignore the plane.
The helicopter we do use to a radio collar the wolves
and so we do get pretty close to them.
It's probably something that is stressful for them
for a few minutes while the helicopter is really loud
and really close and one or two of the wolves are darted
but beyond that, it's over within 15 minutes
and they go back to their daily life.
-You mentioned wolves live together and every once in a while
you can have uncle Mike will join the pack.
-Exactly.
-What's the benefit that you've been able
to observe of like, why would wolves do that?
What's the benefit to being in a pack versus just being the lone wolf?
-Yes, that's a fascinating question that I hope to research
at some point.
Most of the time that a Wolf that's unrelated
to the pack is allowed to join the pack,
it's usually a male and it's usually joining a pack
that doesn't have very many males to begin with
and so there's probably some benefit to the pack for having,
like Dan talked about, the larger male wolf
helping to hunt large prey.
They helped provision pups and they have a lot of value
to wolf's social life
and with that, I was going to get into the five reasons wolves live
in these big family groups.
The first one is related to what Dan was talking about, hunting.
If you're hunting a large animal like Dan described,
like an elk or a bison, you do need a big group.
You can't do it by yourself, that's actually very rare
and very dangerous.
It's ideal if you have a pack of four or more.
That's what our studies have shown here in Yellowstone.
If you're hunting an elk, you don't want to live in a pack
below four.
If you live in a pack greater than four,
it actually might not help you out very much.
I think that the statistics show that huge packs
that have a lot of pups might actually not make as many
or not be quite as successful hunting because pups have a tendency
to run out ahead of the adults and ruin the hunt
and bust everything up.
Those huge packs might actually have to teach those pups
how to behave during the hunting.
While hunting bison it's ideal to live in a pack size of
it's much bigger.
It's an ideal pack size of around nine to 12 or so
and that's because the bison is much larger than an elk
and they need a lot of big animals, a lot of bigger males like Dan
referenced to try and take down an animal that's maybe 2,000 pounds.
The second reason wolves live in large groups like this
is raising pups.
Cooperative breeders are, like I said, pretty rare
in the mammal world and they need enough pups
to not only provision the female, but also bring the pups food.
The pups need to stay warm.
Wolves around here in Yellowstone actually den in April
which is still pretty wintry.
There's a lot of snow.
Some of them actually dig through snow to get to their den
and so it's still pretty cold and they need to be kept warm
by the female for the first 10 days or so.
That means that the other adults in the pack have to bring her food
so she's not going off and feeding and making kills.
She's just sticking with the pups for a while.
When she does eventually leave, she'll let some of the younger wolves
go into the den, keep the pups warm, keep them safe
from anything like grizzly bears, black bears,
even coyotes, while they're so little,
they're pretty vulnerable.
By the time they're a couple months old
and she's weaning them off of milk,
the entire pack has to bring food
to the pups and they get the hang of it pretty quickly.
Some wolves know exactly what to do, ones who've been through it before.
During the spring season, every Wolf actually sees a rise
in the hormone prolactin, which makes them want to caregive
and so they seem to have this really strong instinct
to bring things back to the pups.
Food being at the top of the list but if they can't find food,
they might bring something fun to play with like an antler.
We've found some funny things at wolf den sites.
A baseball hat that somebody lost that a Wolf grabbed
and brought up to the pups.
I'm sure it was a fun thing to chew on for a while.
The third reason wolves live in these big groups has to do
with disease ecology.
You might think that if a disease is coming through
that you don't want to live in a group,
that you want to be off by yourself
so that you don't have a chance of catching it
from living in a tight group like that.
For wolves, it's slightly different, or at least it is different
with mange, which is a tiny mite that burrows underneath the skin
and causes them terrible irritation and they will itch and scratch
until they actually lose quite a lot of fur.
A Wolf that gets mange, even if it progresses pretty badly,
if it lives in a pack where all of the rest of its pack mates
are fine,
they can actually make kills in the pack.
The ill wolf can stay with the pack and the chances of it recovering
is actually pretty high, much higher than if it lived in a small pack
or it's other packmates are sick too.
A good example of this is the beta female
of the Junction Butte pack.
She had mange terribly when she was a pup.
I think she was missing about half her fur.
She had no fur on her tail, but she stuck with the pack.
The rest of the pack was healthy.
She was able to recover and she's now almost seven years old.
I think she was the biggest Wolf that we captured
this last collaring season.
We switched out her color.
She was a huge healthy female one of the biggest we've ever caught.
She also has a missing left eye.
Probably during a hunting bout at some point a few years ago,
probably got it poked by a stick or an antler or something
and her eye is gone but you would never know.
She's incredibly-- Wolves are like that.
They're incredibly resilient.
It's hard to study wolf injuries because they hide it so well,
but it's probably happening quite a lot out there
due to their risky life
and if they can stick with a pack that's healthy,
they're going to be okay.
Now, the last reason or sorry, the fourth reason
that wolves live in these big family groups
are to compete with scavengers.
A Wolf pack will make a kill.
Let's say it's an elk and they will feed
as much as they can.
They can actually consume as much as 20 pounds of meat
in one sitting,
but if they do that, it's like Thanksgiving day
where they have to actually go off and take a nap
and rest for a few hours before they can eat again.
Unlike a mountain lion or a bear, wolves make no attempt
to hide their kill at all.
It's just usually out in the open so that foxes, coyotes, ravens,
eagles, magpies, all things will be able to feed
on that during that time period
where wolves are not feeding and they're actually often resting
and so they're actually getting a lot of food off of the carcass.
Now, a huge pack would be able to make a kill
and eat the whole thing,
but that's not ideal because then they have
to go make another kill.
Maybe everybody is still a little bit hungry.
A really tiny pack, if they make a kill we'll have to go off and eat
and there'll be a lot of time in between there where they'll lose
a lot of meat to scavengers.
A pack that's right at about 10 or 12 wolves
is able to eat enough in the first bout, go off,
and then come back pretty quickly
and be able to eat up the rest of the carcass over the course
of a few days depending on how big it is.
They won't lose quite as much to scavengers as those really small
or really big packs.
The last reason wolves are a group living,
and I say last reason,
but there's probably tons of other reasons we've not even begun
to examine or even think of.
The last reason I'll talk about today are these fights between packs
and wolves are very territorial.
It's an important part of their life history strategies.
They will fight each other to maintain territory,
maintain a safe space to raise their pups
and make sure they have access to prey.
These fights actually account for half of their mortality here
in Yellowstone.
Every other wolf here in Yellowstone will end up dying by running
into another pack and being killed.
Fighting another pack is extremely important for them.
If they live in a pretty big group, they can actually stay pretty safe.
If the average pack size of a Wolf in Yellowstone is about 10
and you want to make sure if you run into any other pack
that you're going to win,
you definitely want to live in a pack size of 12 or more.
If average pack size in Yellowstone is 10
and wolves are looking at all of these different five factors
plus many other things,
they want to pick the Goldilocks zone.
They don't want to live in a pack size of only four
to hunt elk because they have to live in a pretty big pack size
to fight other packs.
They've narrowed in where they can maximize,
they can not ignore any one of these reasons,
but use all of the reasons together and have arrived
at a pack size of 10 as being ideal for them.
Now humans studies have shown that people cooperate
are most efficient in group settings at only about three to seven people
and so I always find it kind of interesting
that wolves might actually be a little bit better
at this than we are.
Thank you so much for joining us this morning.
I think we can take some questions. -You want to jump back in here?
We had some questions in here.
You guys get to spend a lot of time in the field.
Is there any particular story or something that's popped out
about just to share a little behind the scenes
of why it's so unique in your position?
Like to see some of the things that your typical visitor
might not see.
-Well, I showed up here in 1997.
I was a young biologist at the time and one of my first field seasons
was to observe denning behavior in wolves in Yellowstone.
I remember distinctly the first litter of wild wolf pups
I get to observe from about a mile away
through a spotting scope.
We are watching this den throughout the days
was that first litter coming out
and seeing these young pups on the landscape for the first time.
We got to observe all this wonderful caregiving behavior
that the parents and the other pack members gave.
We get to see them interact with other species,
ravens coming down and trying to steal food
when the adults came back to regurgitate.
There's some really interesting dynamics
here between ravens and wolves,
but a wolf from that litter, as they grew older,
ended up leaving that pack on the northern range.
It was from the Rose Creek pack, and we collared it
when it was a young wolf, a couple years old,
and then it left the area and we lost track of it.
A couple of years later, in 2002, we were doing a survey
down into Bechler, the very remote corner,
the southwest corner of Yellowstone National Park
that had not yet been colonized by wolves
from the reintroduction years.
Lo and behold, during this one tracking flight,
our pilot spotted a pair of wolves and some pups down there.
We flew down the next day, and it was this young wolf
that was collared on the northern range
that had dispersed and started this new Bechler pack.
His number was 192.
He ended up being one of the longest-lived wolves
in the population.
I believe he died at age 12.
He would successfully colonize this new part of the park,
he had turned bright white.
It's just this very unique individual.
For me, it was a very exciting opportunity
because of my long term time here to see his life unfold
from the very moments he emerged from a den,
all the way to becoming a pack leader and colonizing new part
of Yellowstone and living out a full life for 12 years
in a wild place.
That's just a really rare, unique opportunity,
not only for a wolf, but for a biologist
who studies wolves.
-Kira, do you have anything that stands out?
-Yes, I one of my favorite stories, and it's ongoing still today
is the Mollies pack.
They were reintroduced in Yellowstone,
named at the time the Crystal Creek pack in 1995,
but they have continued on.
They're the only pack that was reintroduced
that first year that's actually still around.
They've been around for 25 years.
They have an exceptional longevity and we can look
at all the different reasons why that might be.
They've been incredibly successful maintaining group numbers
and so they live in pretty big pack sizes.
They've also been led by a number of individuals
that have lived for a long time, like that Bechler male did also.
They've been led by a number of really strong females
throughout the years.
We're finding some interesting results
showing that wolf pack territories seem to be matrilineal,
so passed down to female line
either from a mother to a daughter or from sister
to younger sister generally.
We're finding some really cool patterns that way.
I just look back at that whole line of strong females
and admire that quite a lot.
-I'll do the last question for the two of you in respect
to your time.
If you had to give an elevator pitch to somebody
about what you've learned by studying wolves
since you've been here, what's the thing
that you've learned most about studying wolves?
A lesson that you could pick up from just being out in the field
and watching all the things that are happening out there
every day?
-I would say that cooperation is key always
and you never know when you might need a friend,
and so it's always good to keep everybody in mind in that way.
-I would say, we need places like Yellowstone.
We need wild protected preserves that can support natural systems
with all their animal species and all their plant communities
and all the abiotic factors that make these wonderful places
on our planet work.
Wolves needed Yellowstone.
We as human societies need places like Yellowstone,
and we need to work together, as Kira said,
and cooperate and make sure that there are places like this
for future generations.
-Awesome. With that, if you guys want to take a step back,
we'll get all three of us in here.
I want to thank everyone for joining us today.
Again, Dan Stahler and Kira Cassidy.
Next week, I want to remind you, we're going to be joined
by a retired wolf interpreter, Rick McIntyre and again,
senior wildlife biologist, Doug Smith will be joining us.
They will recount the stories from the field
and how wolves have impacted the visitor experience
here in the park.
I encourage you to join us next week.
Again, thank you so much for joining us this week.
We appreciate you guys so much. Have a good one.
-Thanks.