by Aaron Wirsing

For the fourth year running, I've joined professor Tom Quinn (SAFS) at Lake Aleknagik in southwestern Alaska to sample brown bears exploiting the legendary Bristol Bay sockeye salmon run. Our study is noninvasive, relying on barbed wires strung across small spawning streams (see picture) to collect hair samples from passing bears. We then send the hair samples to Professor Lisette Waits, another of our collaborators at the University of Idaho, for individual genoptying, enabling us to determine how many bears use each stream. As we add more years to the investigation, we'll be able to ask a variety of exciting questions, including whether individual bears return to the same stream each year and if there is matrilineal transmission of foraging behavior (i.e., do cubs match the spatial hunting patterns of their mothers?). For now, we're off to check the wires!

Photo by Dean Adams

By Aaron Wirsing

The Washington Wolf Project is now entering its fourth year! This winter, beginning in December, we'll again be collaring deer to monitor their responses to recolonizing wolves. We'll also be testing whether the presence of wolves in eastern Washington is shaping the impacts of deer herbivory on plant communities and easing predation on fawns by suppressing coyotes (a major fawn predator). 

For the first time, you can help us to understand the ecological and economic impacts of wolves here in Washington through tax-deductible donations to a University of Washington gift account that is specific to our lab. Your contributions will be used exclusively to support graduate student research in field. For example, gift funds will support aerial helicopter captures of mule and white-tailed deer for GPS and camera collar deployment, the analysis of wolf scat samples so that we can determine what the wolves have been eating, and the purchase of GPS collars for cougars so that we can monitor responses of these top feline predators to the renewed presence of wolves. We thank you for your support!

Graduate student Carolyn Shores and her research assistant Christina Bankert out monitoring radio-collared deer fawns (photo by A. Wirsing).