Chum salmon seem to be supporting a lot more wolves than would normally live in regions of the park with lower moose densities, says Layne Adams, a USGS biologist. In effect, wolves have an alternative food source to tide them over between large kills.
"There's another player on the stage, and it's a fish," Adams says. "To wolf biologists, that's a pretty big leap."
APRN: In areas of the park where there were lots of ungulates, the wolves were eating about 8 percent salmon. But where ungulates were more scarce, in the northwest corner of Denali, that number jumped to 17 percent.
"I started to come to the realization that having all this salmon available to them could certainly jack up the wolf population," Adams says. "And as long as the wolves are more interested in eating wolves than in eating salmon, it can result in increased predation rates on moose. That's kind of what we're speculating, that that's part of the explnation for low moose densities in that part of the park."
Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Craig Gardner calls the findings "revolutionary" and says they should influence management of Interior wolf and moose populations.
Salmon-eating wolves are not unheard of, says Fish and Game, but they're not as good at fishing as bears. Scientists in British Columbia have also studied fish-eating wolves.
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