The Effects Of Gray Wolves On Ecosystems

Decent Essays
Gray wolves range in color from grizzled gray or black to all-white. As the ancestor of the domestic dog, the gray wolf resembles German shepherds or malamutes. Though they once nearly disappeared from the lower 48 states, today wolves have returned to the Great Lakes, northern Rockies and Southwestern United States.

Wolves play a key role in keeping ecosystems healthy. They help keep deer and elk populations in check, which can benefit many other plant and animal species. The carcasses of their prey also help to redistribute nutrients and provide food for other wildlife species, like grizzly bears and scavengers. Scientists are just beginning to fully understand the positive ripple effects that wolves have on ecosystems.

Diet
Wolves eat

Related Documents

  • Improved Essays

    Clayton Hull-Crew Summary

    • 1502 Words
    • 7 Pages

    Wolves Clayton Hull-Crew wrote an editorial on the US-Represented website reflecting on the reintroduction of wolves into the Yellowstone National Park. Hull-Crew states that the wolves have been responsible for a major ecological shift beginning at the top of the food chain, slowly making its way to the bottom, effecting everything from beaver dams to river bed erosion. Hull-Crew claims that the wolves have created what is called a “Trophic Cascade” of events. A Trophic cascade is, “an ecological phenomenon triggered by the addition or removal of top predators and involving reciprocal changes in the relative populations of predator and prey through a food chain, which often results in dramatic changes in ecosystem structure and nutrient cycling.…

    • 1502 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The wolves in Yellowstone provide more food for the other animals because once they finish eating the part they eat than other animals can go and eat the parts they didn’t. Before the wolves were restored back into Yellowstone the elk mostly died from deep snows. According to researchers from the University of California at Berkeley the combination of less snow and more wolves benefits scavengers from big to small animals like ravens and grizzly bears. As Chris Wilmers said scavengers used to rely on winter-killed elk for food now they depend on wolf-killed elk and this benefits ravens, eagles, magpies, coyotes and bears. All these animals scavenge off carcasses and eagles, ravens and all the meat eaters benefit by the protein that the wolves leave on the landscape(MacNulty).Ed Bangs said “It turns out that the Indian legends of ravens following wolves are true-they do follow them because wolves mean…

    • 541 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Grey Wolf Populations in Montana over the years varies The wolf is a controversial topic in not just involving Montana wolf hunting laws and regulations, but in several other western states. The population of wolves in Montana has varied over the years, with 412 wolves counted in 2013 with 16 breeding pairs being confirmed. The Montana portion of the Greater Yellowstone area had a minimum of 122 wolves in 23 packs with 11 breeding pairs, and Montana’s portion that includes Central Idaho included 94 wolves residing in 20 packs and having six breeding…

    • 470 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The wolf hunting and trapping season should be outlawed because other animals are being injured in the process. These days’ trappers have been catching a lot more than wolves. Some among the list include mountain lions, eagles, fishers, deer and even family pets. In January, a National Park Service employee accidentally stepped into one, just outside Glacier National Park. The next month, a dog got three of its legs caught in two different traps at once.…

    • 412 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Starting in 1995 gray wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone National Park (Ripple et al. 2013). Elk are still the primary food source of the gray wolves and grizzly bears kill elk calves and eat carcasses of other ungulates killed by the gray wolves (Ripple et al. 2013). The reintroduction of the gray wolves helped control the elk population and allowed the plants to grow more berries for the grizzly bear population to eat. After the reintroduction of the gray wolves, the amount of fruit in the grizzly bears diet increased by almost double the amount then when the gray wolves were extinct (Ripple et al. 2013). In addition, the reintroduction of the gray wolves allowed beavers and bison in the park to have higher population because there was less elk eating their food (Ripple et al. 2013).…

    • 932 Words
    • 4 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    They could be, but not necessarily. “In fact, their fur is a mix of gray, rust, black, and cream.” The mexican wolf can look like a German Shepherd, but has a wider skull and longer ears. They can also look somewhat like a coyote, but mexican gray wolves are larger and have a higher tail. Mexican wolves usually range from 4.5 to 5.5 inches in length, 60-80 pounds in weight, and have a height of 26-32 inches.…

    • 501 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Red Wolf Research Paper

    • 1410 Words
    • 6 Pages

    When the mosquito bites the wolf the bloodstream gets affected. Adult worms live in the wolf’s heart and cause many problems that can later lead to death. The North Carolina Wildlife Service decided that it would be best to take the wolves out of the wild because they were in such poor condition. (Defenders of Wildlife)…

    • 1410 Words
    • 6 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Great Essays

    Introduction The reintroduction of the Mexican Gray wolf into the southwestern United States has been a subject of large controversy in the past few decades. They first became protected by the Endangered Species Act of 1976; this species that had numbers in the thousands only a few decades earlier had become completely extinct in the United States (Southwest Wildlife). In 1960 the population dropped to seven, and yet there were still no efforts to implement their recovery as a species for 16 more years. Currently the goal of the United States Fish and Wildlife Service is to expand the population in the wild to at least one hundred (Bergman).…

    • 1668 Words
    • 7 Pages
    Great Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Grey Wolf Research Paper

    • 2384 Words
    • 10 Pages

    An increased level of nutrients in soil has been recorded in areas where prey remains, from wolf hunts, were left to decompose (Smith 126). Discarded prey remains, from Wolf hunts, become a secondary food source for various other scavenger species (Smith 121). Secondary food sources left by Wolves are more favorable for scavengers then human-influenced food sources. Ravens and Bears are stand-outs for the long list of scavengers that take advantage of wolf-hunt leftovers. Bears take advantage of the Wolves speed to find food, especially during autumn when they need…

    • 2384 Words
    • 10 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Now there are people that are hunting wolves in the state of Michigan for pure sport, and many of the population oppose this. The Gray Wolves have been struggling for 50 years on the brink of extinction. There are now less than 700 wolves in Michigan. The Gray wolf and or subspecies of the gray wolf (the Timber Wolf) has been undertaking many infringements on it’s rights, struggling to stay on the endangered species list instead, being knocked down to just ‘threatened. ’(“Michigan.”…

    • 570 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    The Mexican wolf is the southernmost subspecies of gray wolf in North America, its natural habitat was that of the southwest United States and Mexico, Texas, New Mexico and Arizona as their home range in the US. (Rinkevich, Murphy, & Barrett, 2011). The gray wolves were a menace to rancher’s cattle and farmer’s livestock. Depredation of livestock led ranchers and state governments to declare war on the Mexican gray wolves through public and private bounties. The Mexican gray wolves were successfully removed from the wild.…

    • 1018 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Wolf Reintroduction Essay

    • 614 Words
    • 3 Pages

    One of the most renowned rewilding projects which has demonstrated the effects rewilding has on a whole ecosystem, was the reintroduction of grey wolves (Canis lupus) into Yellowstone National Park in the North West of the United States. The wolves were reintroduced to the park in 1995-1996 and have subsequently recolonised the whole park and some of the surrounding area known as the greater Yellowstone ecosystem (GYE) (Smith et al., 2003). The reintroduction of the wolves has had a great effect on the ecosystem of Yellowstone; the wolves have greatly reduced the numbers of ungulates, especially Elk which have been found to support the wolf packs almost entirely (Smith et al., 2003). The wolves have also had an effect on many of the other organisms…

    • 614 Words
    • 3 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Decent Essays

    I feel that fox are important to the ecosystem. They help keep the food web in blalnce. Foxes are becoming axtinct from overhunting and can badly affect the ecosystem. Foxs help keep the food web in control and in order just as other species do.…

    • 247 Words
    • 1 Pages
    Decent Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Small mammals play a vital role in the ecosystem. They have significant influences on vegetation, soil, exert predatory pressure on other animals, provide food for predators, and influence other components and ultimately the whole system. Vegetation influences may include effects on primary productivity as small mammals can consume about 60% to 80% of plant species composition, and decomposition of plant materials. They influence the rate of decomposition of organic materials by adding as much as 58% of green herbage and reducing the particle size of vegetative material. Reduction of particle size of living and dead vegetative by small mammals also increases decomposition rates.…

    • 393 Words
    • 2 Pages
    Improved Essays
  • Improved Essays

    Grey Wolves

    • 1115 Words
    • 5 Pages

    2.1 The Proposed Work The objective of proposed research is to study and analyze the presence of suspicious network traffic behavior of every categorization attack instance along with normal network traffic pattern collected from modified KDDCUP99 intrusion dataset, as appeared in the form of modified dataset sizes deployed in experimental work. The methodology is enhanced with the hybrid approach, i.e. determining the evolutionary computation technique combine with supervised machine learning classifiers intent to optimize the parameters to obtain fittest solutions as well from the refined attributes. In this proposed methodology, a new meta-heuristics model known as ‘Grey Wolf Optimizer’ (developed by Mirjalili et.al., 2014) organizes to…

    • 1115 Words
    • 5 Pages
    Improved Essays