Killing Wolves Kills Other Animals Too
Dec. 15, 2004 — -- Scientists who have been studying the effects of restoring the wolf population in areas like Yellowstone National Park have found a surprising twist in this often emotional story.
While the return of these fierce hunters has been tough on their prey, it apparently has made it possible for many other creatures to survive and flourish because of changing eating habits of large herbivores, including elk. Now that the wolves are back, elk are less likely to feed in areas where they might be at risk, and that has facilitated the natural recovery of riverbanks and other areas that are so critical to beavers, birds, insects and other animals.
So while many researchers have been focusing on the lethal impact of the restoration of wolves, the fear of wolves by some animals has possibly had an even more dramatic impact on the entire region.
Scientists are calling it the "ecology of fear."
"The fear instilled in the elk, based on the return of wolves, has affected the ecosystem in ways we didn't think about before," says William Ripple, a forestry scientist at Oregon State University in Corvallis. Ripple and an Oregon State colleague, Robert Beschta, reported some surprising findings recently in the journals BioScience and Forest Ecology and Management.
Wolves once roamed the entire North American continent, from the Arctic to Mexico, but they were nearly wiped out early in the last century because of the fear of a different animal, humans. Ranchers and hunters were particularly angry over wolves because they were blamed for killing livestock and game animals, and that attitude has not changed much.
What has changed, however, is federal protection for wolves, and an ongoing effort to re-establish wolf packs in Yellowstone, as well as several other areas. That has lead to bitter resentment by some who still fear the impact of the repatriation of wolves.
It has also resulted in wide-ranging studies of what happens when a predator is restored, and how that impacts other animals, not just the ones the predator likes to eat.
