Camera Spots Wolverine in Sierra Nevada
By Steve Lawrence, Associated Press
March 6, 2008

SACRAMENTO, Calif. (AP) — A research project aimed at weasels has turned up a bigger prize: a picture of a wolverine, an elusive animal scientists feared may have been driven out of the Sierra Nevada long ago by human activity.

The discovery could affect land-use decisions if the wolverine is declared an endangered species, a step the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is considering, although the animals typically live at high elevations where there is limited development.

A graduate student at Oregon State University, Katie Moriarty, got a picture of a wolverine recently on a motion-and-heat-detecting digital camera set up between Truckee and Sierraville, in the northern part of the mountain range.

Moriarty was trying to get pictures of martens, which are slender brown weasels, for a project she was doing with the U.S. Forest Service's Pacific Southwest Research Station.

She said that when she saw the wolverine in the picture early last Sunday morning, it was a "complete shock. It was not something I would expect by any means."

News of the picture surprised scientists, who thought wolverines, if they still inhabited the Sierra, would be found only in the southern part of the range, not in the Lake Tahoe area.

There had been sightings of wolverines by reputable people but no solid proof they were still in the Sierra, said Bill Zielinski, a research ecologist for the Forest Service who was working with Moriatry.

"The conventional wisdom was that they were pretty much gone from California," said Zielinski. "There's been a lot of other camera work and a variety of methods used to track rare carnivores. Those same methods, if wolverines had been around, would have detected them, we thought."

Zielinski said he sent a copy of the picture to a colleague who is a wolverine expert and who verified that the animal in the picture "looks like the real deal." He also said he didn't think there had been any tampering with the picture before he received it.

"The student I worked with has the utmost integrity in these matters," Zielinski said. "This picture was in her control at all times. It went immediately from the camera to her e-mail and to mine."

Shawn Sartorius, a biologist with the Fish and Wildlife Service, said the wolverine could be a long-lost California native, an immigrant from Washington or Idaho or a captive wolverine that had been released into the wild.

"It would be fantastic if it's a real California wolverine because they are a genetically distinct group that was probably isolated at least 2,000 years and possibly 12,000 years ago," Sartorius said. "That would be a pretty important find."

He said scientists wanted to get a DNA sample from the wolverine in Moriarty's picture to determine its origin. That could be done by locating hair or feces left behind by the animal.

Paul Spitler, public lands director for the Center for Biological Diversity, an environmental group based in Tucson, Ariz., said his group gets reports of wolverine sightings "on a regular basis" in the southern Sierra.

"We know they are in the Sierra," he said. "We don't know how many and we don't know how far they travel in the Sierra, but we certainly know they exist in the Sierra Nevada."

The Fish and Wildlife Service is scheduled to announce Tuesday whether it plans to move ahead with the lengthy process of classifying wolverines as endangered.

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Government Denies Protected Status for Wolverines
By John Cramer, Missoulian
March 11 2008

Wolverines in the contiguous United States were denied federal protection Monday at a time when new studies suggest they could become extinct within 45 years if climate change eliminates the snow zone they depend upon.

Scientists say they are still puzzling out new revelations and investigating unanswered questions about wolverines' year-round dependence on remote mountains that have a deep spring snowpack, from denning, foraging and mortality to traveling “superhighways” in search of mates.

But just as salmon, polar bears and other species are tied to the landscape in ways that are both obvious and mysterious - and increasingly affected by humans - the wolverine has found its niche threatened as snow coverage diminishes.

“Unless wolverines show great adaptability, they will be gone,” said Kevin McKelvey, a research ecologist with the U.S. Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station in Missoula and one of the studies' lead authors.

Wolverines are among the rarest and least-understood mammals in North America. The largest member of the weasel family, their reputation for ferocity belies a delicate reliance on subapline regions of North America and Eurasia.

Wolverines' range has been greatly reduced in the Lower 48 states due to trapping, poisoning and habitat destruction in the early 20th century, but no historical or current population estimates are available because too little is known about the species, researchers say.

Environmental groups petitioned the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 1995 and 2000 and filed a lawsuit in 2006 in an effort to list wolverines in the Lower 48 states under the Endangered Species Act.

The agency said Monday that wolverines do not warrant federal protection because they aren't geographically or genetically separated from wolverine populations in Canada and Alaska and thus aren't significant to the species' survival.

Conservation groups criticized the decision, which is to be published Tuesday in the Federal Register.

“This sets a new low in a long line of irresponsible, disturbing decisions made of late by the Bush administration,” said Jamie Rappaport Clark, a spokesman for Defenders of Wildlife and former director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. “The Endangered Species Act was designed to protect and preserve imperiled wildlife populations - not so that we can pass our responsibilities off onto our border neighbors, who may not have the resources or protections that we have here.”

Jeff Copeland and other Rocky Mountain Research Station scientists, who have pioneered wolverine research for the past two decades, recently completed several studies in cooperation with other institutions that suggest wolverines' survival could be jeopardized by global warming.

In one study, biologists looked at wolverine denning and the spring snowpack in North America and Eurasia. Female wolverines tunnel deep into the snow, where they rear their kits until late spring.

After overlaying more than 600 den sites with satellite images of snow coverage from 2000 to 2006, the researchers found that 99 percent of the dens were located in areas that still had snow in mid-May.

The study also found that the wolverines, which had global positioning system collars, spent 91 percent of their time year-round in the high-elevations areas that had a deep spring snowpack.

In two other studies, the Research Station ecologists looked at projected temperatures and spring snow coverage.

The projections indicated that much of the world's traditional spring snowpack could vanish by mid-May by 2050, meaning suitable habitat for wolverines - and other snow-dependent mammals - could decline by up to 95 percent in the contiguous United States.

Wolverine refuges could persist in the high mountains of Colorado and California, but wolverines have disappeared from those regions.

In another study, Research Station scientists used GPS collars and computer modeling to look at wolverine gene flows and the potential impact of global warming.

Results showed that wolverines move along routes dictated by spring snow coverage, often following long and circuitous paths year-round rather than a straight line while mating, denning and foraging.

If climate change eliminates these “superhighways” and “Grand Central Station” meeting points - one of which is at Lolo Peak, just south of Missoula - it is unclear whether wolverines will become genetically isolated or find new ways to move about, the researchers said.

In the meantime, Western wildlife biologists and land managers could use the findings to help maintain critical habitat for wolverines, the results indicate.

Wolverines, which have low reproductive rates, have one of the lowest densities of any carnivore in the world with territories that cover hundreds of miles.

The new studies, which are being prepared for peer-review publication, follow earlier work by the Research Station.

The station's ecologists have analyzed more than 100 years of scientific records, anecdotal reports and DNA samples from museum specimens in an effort to determine wolverines' historic range in the Lower 48 states.

In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, and as defined under the provisions of "fair use", any copyrighted material herein is distributed without profit or payment for non-profit research and for educational use by our membership.