﻿-Good morning everyone. Welcome to Yellowstone National Park.
I'm ranger Jake.
I'm a member of the social media team here in the park.
We're broadcasting live today from
the headquarters area and Mammoth Hot Springs.
We're actually up on the boardwalks again.
Directly behind me is Canary spring.
You might be able to hear the water flowing a little bit.
If you look off in a distance, you can
see Mount Everts in the distance and you
can see it snowed again overnight.
We're just below freezing temperature right now.
It's a pretty typical spring day here in the Rockies.
If you're watching at home, something new, consider sharing,
hitting the share button and share this with your friends and family
and so they can join also while we're live.
We'd really appreciate that.
Before we get started, there's a couple
of things that I wanted to share with you all.
First, thing we really want to
apologize for having to move last week's broadcast until today.
We were scheduled to go live at essentially the same time
that the decision came down to close the park for health
precautions, and we thought it was probably the best move to go ahead
and postpone the live so that we could focus on that communication.
As of this broadcast, the park is still closed to visitation.
When conditions change, we will absolutely
share that information as soon as we can via all of our lines
of communication, our website, social media, all those different things.
Another thing I want to stress is during this closure,
we are still working hard, many of the people,
the jobs that are in the park are in the field.
They're able to maintain that safe distance.
We're still doing everything we can to
protect the park and to get it ready for the summer season, and basically
get it ready so that when we get the approval to open the park,
we're ready for everyone to come and visit.
Part of that work includes staying active on social media on all of our
platforms, and we know that a lot of you were being asked to stay home.
You might be watching this from your home with your friends and family
right now from all around the world, and that's why
we believe now more than ever that this is the time to use these types
of tools to be able to bring Yellowstone directly to you, so we really
appreciate you following us along.
With all of that, let's get back to why we're here today.
We are commemorating the 25th anniversary
of the Wolf Reintroduction in Yellowstone National Park.
To commemorate that, we've been hosting these series of Facebook lives with
different wolf experts throughout the entire month of March.
Today was supposed to be the last day, we were going to go live with Doug
Smith, but because last week we had to
postpone, so today will be our fourth week and then we're
going to finish things out on Thursday.
We thank you for watching today and encourage
you also to join us again on Thursday.
I mentioned that we're going to be joined
by a wildlife biologist, Dr. Dan Stahler.
To give you a little background on Dan, he started
with the Wolf project in 1997, moved into his current position in 2002.
He's also the project lead for the Yellowstone Cougar Project
and helps lead the Elk Research program here in the park.
He holds a master's from the University of Vermont and a Ph.D. from UCLA
in Yellowstone's predator scavenger relationships and population genetics.
He'll be talking a little bit about that today.
Also, focused on social dynamics and behavior of Yellowstone wolves.
So he's got a ton of information.
Hopefully, we'll be able to share a lot of that with you today.
With that, I'm going to go ahead and jump
behind the camera and once I'm back there, I'll let Dan come around
over on the other side, I'll be monitoring your
comments and your questions and when he's all done, we'll go ahead
and see if we can ask him some of those questions that have come through.
Thanks again for joining us, and here we go.
-Thanks, Jake. Thanks, everyone, for tuning in.
We're very thankful that we have this form of communication with you.
I know a lot of you are missing being able to access your national
parks and other open spaces.
These are tough times, but this is a great opportunity for us to still
reach out to you and share knowledge and information
about these wonderful places that all belong to us.
For any of you students out there is a great
opportunity to get a little daily science lesson in.
Any teachers or students, feel free to share this
because many of you now are in a new mode of learning.
Today what I'd like to share with you is some of the discoveries
we've made here in Yellowstone, and the importance
of the recovery of wolves to this national park 25 years ago,
and what that means for understanding how we can
save other imperiled species worldwide.
The Endangered Species Act often has a misperception
of it not being particularly successful.
In fact, it's actually been very successful.
A program like Yellowstone Wolf
Recovery has been even more informative to help
other species in the future.
One of the big challenges is with endangered species, usually,
they're in small population sizes, they're isolated, there's often
genetic health issues because of them being highly inbred and not a lot
of genetic diversity, which is important to them being able to adapt
and deal with environmental changes and diseases and things like that.
What Yellowstone has really taught us is we've
provided a great example of a successful recovery and the logistics
and the mechanics that it took to
actually bring an animal that's charismatic but very
controversial back to this landscape.
Translocating an endangered species into Yellowstone was
relatively new and there were not a lot of examples out there
on the landscape previous to that, and so I think what
Yellowstone has really done is shown us how we can actually do that.
We can take an animal, bring it to a place like Yellowstone,
release it into the wild, and study
and understand how that species can be covered.
Its biology, its behavior, the predator-prey dynamics, the genetic
health and diversity of our population and how to maintain that.
That was really important, and that's going to be an important
understanding for the future because the reality is many species
on the planet today are facing a lot of challenges
with habitat destruction and human impacts and climate
change and other factors that are challenging to the imperiled species.
Having successful programs like Yellowstone's Wolf Recovery is going
to be instrumental in guiding forward
and how we deal with other endangered species.
Today, what I'd really like to focus on is the world of genetics.
It's been a really important part of our program here.
Yellowstone wolves have been at the frontier of genetic
studies for wildlife species now for the last 25 years.
What I'm going to be talking and sharing
with you today is some of the contributions to- our
understanding of evolution, of behavior, of health, of traits that go
into making animals successful on a landscape,
and how Yellowstone wolves have contributed to that.
Before I tackled, I do want to deal with the question of wolf taxonomy.
This is a very common question
that we hear usually generated by critics of bringing bowls back to
Yellowstone is that the wrong wolf was reintroduced to this
park and that we have a larger non-native Canadian
aggressive animal back on the landscape that doesn't fit into
this ecosystem from what was here historically.
That's an important thing to address
because there is a lot of misperception about it.
One of the biggest challenges we face
with understanding this is early on the species Canis lupus was broken
into different subspecies around North America.
Subspecies is a delineation, that's one a finer scale than then species.
The Wolf Canis lupus has been recognized in the early
part of the 1900s as having different subspecies
around North America and that was based largely
on morphological differences, maybe coat color differences,
body size not really based on behaviors or things like that.
It's largely based on school morphology.
One of the important lessons that we've
learned in recent times with the advent of genetic tools
actually look at is that there are a lot of mistakes may
be made and how we define what a species or subspecies is.
What taxonomy is, is the science of naming and categorizing things.
What we can look at, for example, is early wolf
biologists or taxonomists that we're trying to
break down wolves in North America.
Look for differences in skull sizes.
Jake, if you want to hand me those skulls, I'll just give you an example.
Many taxonomists in the 1940s that
first started looking at this would have
museum specimens or skulls and hides
from trappers, and here I'm holding up two skulls.
These are actually cast skulls from Yellowstone
wolves and my left hand, this is an adult female
Wolf and in my right hand, and Jake's
holding that up in front of the camera is an adult male wolf.
Just to give you an example, how early
taxonomists might've been challenged by
understanding wolf taxonomy and subspecies delineation is
you can see how different the sizes are of these animals
and if a taxonomist that was using skull
morphology to really understand what a subspecies
was and if they didn't know the age or the sex of an animal,
they could determine this to be a different subspecies from this.
Now, when genetics came online, that helped.
Let me go off-camera real quick.
That help with us understanding how to better describe subspecies.
In the 1940s into the '50s, it was recognized 24
different subspecies in North America of Canis lupus and at the time
the wolf that was thought to be in this area was Canis lupus irremotus.
Actually that subspecies is no longer recognized by the scientific field.
In the mid-'90s, around the time wolves were being
reintroduced to Yellowstone, taxonomists use both
skull morphology and other morphological characteristics
as well as genetic techniques to
understand a new way to view wolf taxonomy.
What we see here is what has largely
been recognized as the most recent accepted version of wolf taxonomy.
Part of the discrepancy of what was the wrong wolf
brought back, what was thought to be here historically
is Canis lupus nubilus and you can see it's throughout the Great
Plains, up into Eastern Canada and Western Canada on this side,
and that the wolf to the North and Canada was Canus lupus occidentalis.
This would've been the origin of the wolves
that were brought down from Canada.
Now, what's really important to understand is this
line right here that separates occidentalis with nubilus.
It's somewhat arbitrary.
What we know about animals like wolves is they can travel large
distances, disperse across many hundreds of miles in just a few days.
There is no way that there was not
genetic gene flow between or gene flow between these populations,
wolves to the North and to the South.
There are some differences in morphology and color, but not significant.
In fact, the wolves that were probably
in the Great Plains and the part of Yellowstone and parts of Montana
and Idaho and Wyoming were hunting bison on the Great Plains,
one of the most formidable prey for wolves in North America.
This idea that the wrong Wolf is here is really not based on any biological
truth and is an artifact of more dated taxonomic differentiation.
That's one important thing to describe to you is that the wolves that were
here historically were intermingling up into Canada.
There was gene flow.
There was very few differences in body size.
Certainly, there were no known differences and wolfs from
Canada be more aggressive or more dangerous to be around.
We can dispel that myth.
Next, I want to go into understanding how we've applied genetic techniques.
Now, what you can see here in the back of me at Canary Springs are these
colorful waters coming out of these thermal hot pools.
What makes those colors are bacteria.
In 1969 and the lower guys were based in Yellowstone national park,
scientists discovered a new bacteria that they
named, gave the scientific name thermos aquaticus.
This super bacteria is thought
to be very similar to what the early life forms were on this
planet and that they could handle-- Therey were heat tolerant.
They can live in these very challenging thermal
pools and live and reproduce and survive.
What was really fascinating about this discovery
is that in the 1980s, it was discovered that this bacteria in order
for it to survive in this environment,
produced these heat resistant enzymes.
These heat resistant enzymes are referred to as Taq polymerase.
I'll try to break this down for you.
What Taq polymerase was identified being able to do is it revolutionized
modern medicine, DNA forensics and genetics, and evolutionary biology.
That scientist in the 1980s were able to harness
the power of this enzyme and synthesize it and use it to do
DNA amplification and replication of all life forms.
It allowed us to now revolutionize how we understand
the diversity of life, evolutionary biology, the study
of infectious disease, human medicine, and forensics.
Right here in Yellowstone national park was the source of using this
thermos aquaticus bacteria to be able
to study molecular genetics of living creatures.
Today, we are using the same technology to study Yellowstone wolves.
One of the main things we do to
study Yellowstone walls is we collect DNA from every wolf.
That's the genetic code that defines that individual's life.
Every wolf that we handle and put a radio collar
on or we find in the field that has
died, we collect a DNA sample, either blood or tissue.
We have that unique genetic code of that individual wool.
This was really important in the early years.
Every individual wolf from Canada that was brought down,
all the founders had their DNA collected.
From there, we've been able to build these family
trees of Yellowstone wolves.
Now, many of you probably connect with your own families.
Your heritage through genealogies and family trees.
We've done the same thing here in Yellowstone.
We've worked with collaborators at the University of California, Los
Angeles and Princeton University to do a family trees
of Yellowstone's wolves, over 400 individuals, over six generations
of wolves over the last 25 years.
Having these pedigrees of wolves and understanding who is related to
each other in the population allows
us to ask all these really fascinating questions.
For example, we've learned that when
wolves choose mates, they avoid inbreeding with their close relatives.
They have the ability to recognize who their kin are.
It's probably through their sense of perception through smell.
You smell like me. You don't smell like me, you're my relative.
I'm familiar with you.
They avoid inbreeding with any other close relatives.
That's a really important discovery to have made here.
It's one of the explanations of why we have a genetically
healthy population because as wolves dispersed from their
pack and try to form a new breeding
pair, they need to select mates that Arthur close
relatives to their offspring are not in bread.
Inbreeding is bad for many
wildlife species and many living creatures because
you tend to have some of those negative effects of genes,
those recessive genes that can express themselves if you have inbreeding
between close relatives and that can be detrimental to a population's health.
Yellowstone has shown us how wolves can find opposite
related or mates that are not their close relatives.
That has promoted genetic diversity within the Yellowstone Park population.
We've also used these pedigrees to see how Yellowstone
wolves are connected to wolves in Idaho, in Northwest Montana.
Part of the delisting criteria for getting bulls off the endangered
species list was to show that they were genetically diverse
and connected across a large regional scale in the Rocky mountains.
The work we did here in Yellowstone with our
collaborators, the US Fish and Wildlife and Nez Perce Tribe
and others showed us that wolves were moving across the landscape over
the last 25 years and intermixing and breeding promoting genetic diversity
throughout the Rocky Mountains. None of the populations are isolated.
That was an important metric to
have to say, we've made a great success here in delisting.
We've also learned how wolves interact
with one another within a pack or between packs
based on who their relatives are.
You're more likely to treat your kin favorably than those that
aren't related to you unless you're seeking mates.
We've used our pedigree stands for all these wonderful questions about how
Yellowstone Recovery was successful, how wolves in the park are linked to
other populations throughout the Rocky Mountains and how our genetic
diversity of our population has
persisted through time and will likely do so in the future.
That's a really important discovery.
We've also now done whole genome sequencing of Yellowstone
wolves and I'm going to hold up a pelt here of Wolf 302.
He was a famous Yellowstone Wolf born in 2000.
This is his pelt. He died in 2009. He has a very fascinating story.
You can see that you'll notice the dark black color of this Wolf.
I'll talk about coat color and a little bit here and 302 was a very famous Wolf
because he taught us a lot about
mating strategies, about social behavior, about
being flexible on a landscape with a lot of competition and challenges.
He was born in the Leopold pack.
He dispersed across the Northern range,
eventually becoming a member of the Druid Peak pack until finally,
starting his own pack, the Blacktail pack before he died in 2009.
This Wolf is significant in that he is among the first wolves to
have their whole genome sequence.
Wolf sequence is similar to many other mammals
have about two and a half billion DNA base pairs.
His whole genome has been sequenced.
This is an important part of understanding not only the history,
evolutionary history of canids like wolves and dogs, but also
understanding genes and traits because we have
the dog genome sequenced as well.
We have an understanding of about 19,000
functional genes in domestic dogs and because domestic dogs'
ancestors or wild wolves, we can use wolves like 302 to understand
genes that are associated with certain behavioral traits, health traits,
morphological traits and it's opened up a whole
new portal of studying wild canids, domestic dogs, and behavior.
302 will forever live on and having his whole genome sequence to become
now a reference individual for many
studies studying dog domestication and behavior.
Yellowstone wolves in general now are part of many studies
understanding canid evolutionary history
genes, code for certain behavioral traits like hyper sociability,
which was discovered to be an important metric we think for dogs being
domesticated from their wild ancestors.
Yellowstone wolves are now part of this larger story about how we've used
genetics to understand evolutionary biology and behavior in wild animals.
We continued to do research and collect DNA on this along the way.
Now, with that, I'd like to cover one final really
exciting story that Yellowstone
moles have taught us through the use of genetics.
That is the coat color story.
I'm going to show you two pelts here of Yellowstone wolves.
You're going to can see, they're a different color.
We have what we refer to as the black wolf
and we have one, the generic gray Wolf.
Now, coat color pigmentation, just like in many
species is controlled by a number of different genes.
What we understand about pigmentation
is that it's important for things like camouflage behavior, finding
mates, thermal regulation and that
because these genes can be important for adaptations
for these animals being successful
on a landscape, there's selection for these
genes and they maintain them in the population.
What was really interesting is with coat color
and wolves, it's been discovered that black wolves are
throughout the Rocky Mountains in the United States and up into Canada.
As you get further North, you get into more white Arctic wolves.
In the central part of the Great Lakes states, you have more gray
wolves and very few black wolves.
What was done in using the dog genome is it was discovered that there are
certain genes that code for black coat
coloration versus gray coat coloration.
What was found is that there was a mutation in domestic dogs thousands
of years ago in the old world.
There was a mutation in a gene called the K locus.
That mutation causes for the dominant inheritance of black coat color.
For those of you at home that have a black lab,
your black lab has the K locus gene.
That begged the question, what is this black
coat color we see in wild wolves?
As we started using our pedigrees in Yellowstone National Park, we
noticed that our wolf packs that had two gray breeding
pairs could only produce gray offspring.
A gray female breeding with a gray male only produced gray pups.
However, our packs where we had a black female breeding with a gray male
produce both black and gray offspring.
We used their pedigrees to look
at that inheritance of that coat color gene and we
discovered that the black coat color gene was dominant and that
if you had a black and gray breeding
pair that you could have both black and gray offspring in the population.
In fact, to this day, Yellowstone has about 50%
black and 50% gray wolves in our population.
We started looking to the evolutionary history
of this black coat color gene, where did it come from?
We knew it had risen first in domestic dogs in the old world.
As we started looking into the K locus gene
in domestic dog breeds and wolf populations
throughout the North America, the discovery was made
that this coat color gene was brought over by early humans
across the Bering Land Bridge from Eurasia into
modern-day, Alaska in Northern Canada.
Humans bringing domestic dogs across about 7,000 years ago brought
these dogs that had black coat color genes in them and some of these dogs
bred with wild wolves somewhere in the area of the Yukon.
This gene got into wild wolf populations and then
it was selected for and swept
through North American wolf populations over the last several thousand years.
We can attribute this black coat color gene that
we see in wild wolves today to actually a mutation that occurred
first in domestic dogs thousands of years ago.
It's just a fascinating story that links Yellowstone wolves
to humans and human history and their relationship with dogs.
The study gets even more interesting, however though because this gene
not only codes for coat color and the dominant inheritance
of black coat color, but it also is a gene called
the beta-defensin gene that's associated with the immune system.
What we think is going on is that
this gene has been selected for, because not only
is it code for black coat color but actually incur some
survival benefit to wolves with the black coat color gene.
The beta-defensin genes are associated with the immune system so we
hypothesize and we have data to support
this that black color wolves, their immune system functions
differently than gray colored wolves and this
gives them an advantage under some environmental
conditions where they might be exposed to certain pathogens.
Diseases like canine distemper disease or mange or other
diseases that canids get, we believe
there's some link between their survival ability
having this black coat color gene and that's kept this
population or this gene in the population through time.
Another reason we think we have about 50/50%
of black and gray in our population
is that there's some advantages to being gray.
What that advantage tradeoff may be is we did a study
looking at reproductive success and we found that
gray-colored female wolves had higher
litter success, survival of their pups than black colored wolves.
We think part of that could have to do with when you have an immune
system that is amped up when exposed to a pathogen, your body
goes into high gear and that takes energy to do that.
That can benefit you exposed to that pathogen but it might
draw energy away that you would otherwise invest
in raising offspring or gestation or lactation.
We in Yellowstone are trying to determine what those differences are
between gray-colored wolves and black-colored
wolves and the link to health.
We also have shown that gray-colored
wolves are more aggressive than black-colored
wolves and that can be a survival advantage when you're encountering
other packs during territorial conflict.
There seems to be this fitness trade-off between being gray and black
and that's maintaining both of these genes in the population.
There's one final piece of this puzzle that's really fascinating is
when we look at the hundreds of breeding pairs over the last 25 years
of wolves, we see a greater frequency of a black wolf breeding with a gray
wolf than a gray breeding with a gray or a black breeding with a black.
By doing so, their offspring have both
usually on average both gray and black individuals in their litters.
All these things together is maintaining both of these colors in our
population and Yellowstone now has
become a valuable case study in understanding
genes that code for a specific trait like coat color but also,
those same genes are linked to other functions of the body and Yellowstone
is becoming a really valuable case study in understanding wild genetic
profiles of individuals and how that influences populations.
The only reason we've been able to do that is because 25 years of having
a very visible population, of having longterm science and research
in place to understand behavior, mating,
pack dynamics and social dynamics and mate choice as well as
health and disease profiles in our individuals.
It's become an incredible story that many other
geneticists are looking at and trying to understand
how we can link whole genomes and genes to the health
of individuals and their populations that they belong to.
One final note on that is in 1880, Yellowstone's second superintendent,
Philetus Norris, made the observation when he came into the park that there
were abundant wolves throughout the park.
He described there being the gray Wolf, the coyote, and a black color wolf
that he thought was some species in between the two.
What this second superintendent was seeing in 1880 is actually
a black wolf with the K locus gene here in Yellowstone.
It's part of the native population here, another piece of evidence
to show how gene flow has occurred throughout North America, between
wolves in Canada and historic Yellowstone country.
A really wonderful circular part of the story of coming
back to Yellowstone and how we studied these animals.
With that, I'll take some questions.
-We've got a few questions in here.
The most important is coming from me is
Dan, if you were going to pick to be
a gray or a black wolf, what are you going to pick?
-I think the black wolves look pretty cool on myself.
Behavior and health things aside, I think the black coat color is a really
striking animal on the landscape.
-A question we did get in here regarding the health of black versus
gray is does it mean that black wolves are less likely to get
distemper or mange or other things
like that because of their immune system?
-That's a great question.
The best data we have on that right now is we did analysis on-- We've
had three major canine distemper outbreaks in our population.
Those occurred in 1999, 2005, and 2008.
There's been some other bouts of it, but those were the major ones.
What we looked at is the survival of black-colored wolves with the K
locus gene in the following year after those outbreaks
compared to the survival of the gray-colored wolves.
We found a significant difference in that black wolves had
a higher survival rate following a canine distemper outbreak.
We're doing more research right now.
We're actually doing STEM cell research with wolves.
We've actually are growing cell lines
from Yellowstone wolves where we can do these
controlled laboratory studies where we can challenge these
black-colored cell lines with
gray-colored cell lines and see how they respond.
The research is still underway to resolve that but we do
believe that that is the case with certain diseases.
-With the studies that we're doing, is
there anything that you're working on now
that you're trying- like questions you're
trying to answer that it's not anywhere near
but things you're currently researching?
-I think one of the big values of what
we're doing here in Yellowstone is now that we have whole genome sequence
of wolves and many species and whole genome sequencing is becoming really
important field of molecular science and it's really important
for medicine fighting infectious diseases and is very timely in the world
we're living in right now for obvious reasons.
What we're doing with Yellowstone wolves is because we have the whole dog
genome sequenced and we can identify certain genes that we know are
responsible for health, for disease resistance, for behaviors, we're
trying to look at those same functions
in our wild population here in Yellowstone and understand
how a wild population operates and how those genes function here.
This is important moving forward understanding how animals might
adapt to different landscapes with new
diseases that might be emerging, the effects of climate change.
We could actually understand selection
for certain genes that might give certain individuals or populations
advantages under those conditions.
That's some of the current work we're
doing right now with our colleagues at Princeton
University and at University of California, Los Angeles.
-Is there any work off the top of your head that you can think of that
what we've learned here in Yellowstone
and how we've been able to collaborate with other national parks or other
national parks maybe around the world for their reintroduction?
-Great question. Actually, a very obvious one is the recent reintroduction
of wolves to Isle Royale National Parkin Lake Superior.
That's been an important study there, an important
project there of trying to reboot that population.
That's a great example of an island population that suffered
a lot of the challenges of being highly inbred.
They were skeletal deformities, there was low
reproductive success and survival thought to be attributed
to low genetic diversity in that population.
Yellowstone was able to collaborate and provide information
with our colleagues there at that national park to
give some of the metrics that we
would look for, for understanding the successes of actually
bringing wolves back, translocating wolves to a new population,
how they're going to do, sharing some of the information about monitoring
genetics and genetic health through time.
That's a great example of how Yellowstone has been a model
for recovering wolves in another national park and will be important
for other species and other national parks down the road, I imagine.
-Another interesting question.
In some places, they're starting to see
the cross-breeding of coyotes and wolves.
Is that something that we see?
-We don't see that here in Yellowstone.
In the Western United States, the reason we don't see interbreeding--
Even though they'd be able to interbreed and hybridized and produce viable
offspring, coyotes and wolves, hybridization is thought to be
an explanation for what we see with some of the canids in the great lakes
States, Eastern United States, Southeast United States.
With the red wolf, there's a lot of evidence
suggests that there's more ancient hybridization between
coyotes and gray wolves and some of those lineages.
Same things in parts of Southeastern Canada.
In Yellowstone, I think what we
have is a situation where our wolves are much larger.
Our average male here is about
125 pounds, our average female is about a hundred pounds.
The Western coyote in a place like
Yellowstone is only 25 to 30 pounds, maybe 35 pounds on a big coyote.
They're very aggressive. Wolves are very aggressive to coyotes.
They'll often chase them and kill them so the odds are very low
that a large wolf would breed with a small Western coyote
in the Western landscape of the United States.
It's much more common as you move further East as those canids become
more similar in size and coyotes or gray wolves in those areas are as easily
able to find mates of the same species historically in the last 50 to 60 years.
A great question but we don't see any
hybridization here in the Western United States.
-I think that's most of it.
If there's anything you'd like to do, we can switch places again in our [?]
-I think one final comment I'd make is during these
challenging times, I think Yellowstone wolves are a great
teacher and just some of the things that we can take from them at this
time is they take care of each other,
they take care of their families, and they're very tough.
They deal with every challenge that they face every day.
They get-up and they go back at it again.
That's a wonderful lesson for us in these challenging times.
They're also really good at social distancing from their neighbors.
I'll leave it at that. Thanks for joining in.
We really appreciate you out there.
Don't worry, Yellowstone will be here for you all
when we get through this. Thanks.
-I want to thank everyone for joining us live, it's a little icy out here.
I want to thank you for this live broadcast.
Hopefully, you learned a little something new.
I want t to thank Dan so much for taking the time to
come on here and to chat with everyone.
Just a reminder that this is week four of five.
Today was possibly the last day that we
broadcast, but we are now going to be broadcasting
again live on Thursday at 11 local time here with
Doug Smith for the final week.
We encourage you to join us then.
Again thanks so much, stay safe, stay socially distant.
We'll keep trying to share this virtually with you as much as we can.
Thanks for joining us.