Date: June 22, 2018
Source: S.J. & Jessie E. Quinney College of
Natural Resources, Utah State University
After wolves were reintroduced to
Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s, some scientists thought the large
predator reestablished a 'landscape of fear' that caused elk, the wolf's main
prey, to avoid risky places where wolves killed them. This fueled the emerging
idea that predators affect prey populations and ecosystems not only by eating
prey animals, but by scaring them too. But according to findings from Utah
State University ecologists Michel Kohl and Dan MacNulty, Yellowstone's
'landscape of fear' is not as scary as first thought.
"Contrary to popular belief,
the wolf is not a round-the-clock threat to elk; it mostly hunts at dawn and
dusk, and this allows elk to safely access risky places during nightly lulls in
wolf activity," says Kohl, who completed a doctoral degree at USU in 2018
and is lead author of the paper. "Despite their Hollywood portrayal as
nighttime prowlers, wolves tend to hunker down at night because their vision is
not optimized for nocturnal hunting." With colleagues Daniel Stahler,
Douglas Smith, and P.J. White of the U.S. National Park Service, Matthew Metz
of University of Montana, James Forester of University of Minnesota, Matthew
Kauffman of University of Wyoming, and Nathan Varley of University of Alberta,
Kohl and MacNulty report their findings in an Early View online article of
Ecological Monographs. The article will appear in a future print edition of the
Ecological Society of America publication. The team's research is supported, in
part, by the National Science Foundation.
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