There was a time when trappers would catch them instead of shooting them, and there were a few that could be saved for educational purposes. And that's where it first started.
Since then, wolverines have become Kroschel's passion, and he soon realized his uncanny knack for winning their trust. And when they're bonded with you, they will follow you around in the mountains like a dog. He says the secret to calming wolverines is introducing them to humans when they're first born, and getting them to "imprint on you. And in all these years, I've never been sent to the emergency room.
But even with careful training, a wolverine couldn't be trusted to dig someone out of the snow unattended. Instead, they would be trained to track human scent, and allow search and rescue humans to do the rest of the digging. Before the project can ever become a reality, Kroschel and fellow wolverine conservationist, Mike Miller, would need a litter of wolverines to train as mountaineers. Kroschel recently acquired a female wolverine from Sweden that he's caring for at his wildlife reserve in Haines, Alaska.
Edmonton Wolverines can be taught to sniff out avalanche survivors, trainer says It has long claws and razor-sharp teeth. And it stinks. An innovative technique to assess population size has partly driven the research. Given some basic assumptions, it works like this: biologists survey an area after fresh snowfall and identify sets of tracks. The track lines can be extrapolated to population numbers. An important difference is that a wolverine may sometimes sit tight for two or three days, in a den site or on a kill, and that needs to be factored in.
Collaring and tracking wolverines allowed researchers to ground truth the technique — and learn a lot about wolverines in the process. Results from a cooperative study with Chugach National Forest indicated a wolverine density of 4. The researchers pointed out two other methods used to study wolverines. Hair snares subtly snag a tuft of fur from a passing animal, and the DNA in the follicles enables biologists to identify individual animals, their gender and relatedness, and multiple samples over time can provide a population estimate mark-recapture.
Photo identification uses remote, motion-triggered trail cameras to photograph animals in specific poses that reveal distinctive markings that can identify individuals — much as tail fluke marks are used to identify humpback whales.
The researchers captured 18 different wolverines between September and March Including recaptures, animals were live-trapped 14 times and helicopter-darted 10 times. Among the 18 wolverines captured, there were five juvenile 1—2 years old females, five adult females, four juvenile males and four adult males. Three wolverines did not yield data — they slipped their collars right away, or for some other reasons researchers were unable to detect signals.
All the telemetry work was done in late winter and early spring to better understand how wolverines move during the period when SUPES are conducted. Cameras proved to be a valuable tool for trapping and darting. Motion-triggered trail cameras were set up near the live traps, and researchers wore helmet-mounted video cameras when helicopter darting to help them learn from capture attempts.
That helped them solve an equipment malfunction at one point in the project - they slowed the video down and watched it frame by frame, revealing a problem with the dart design they were able to correct.
Darting can be really efficient under ideal conditions, and Golden said one day they caught four wolverines. Aircraft searched for roaming wolverines, and then called the capture team. Then we get the call and go after them. Darting a moving animal from a moving helicopter is clearly a challenge.
Harrington said the mountainous terrain and relatively small size of the target added to the difficulty. One thing played to their advantage, he said when pursued, wolverines tended to run uphill. In deep snow that really hampered their speed. Once caught, wolverines were quickly processed. The collars were programmed to record GPS locations at min intervals, and were capable of maintaining that rate of data collection for about 3 months and then to continue VHF beaconing for about days longer before battery failure.
Collars also stored altitude and air temperature. Two types of GPS collars were used; both stored thousands of location data points onboard and allowed remote downloading of collar data from the ground or from the air. One model could be released remotely to drop-off, the other could not and required recapture to retrieve collars. Golden and Harrington were successful live-trapping on JBER during the first two or three years while new animals were still coming into the trapsites.
The researchers took advantage of a winter moose hunting season on the joint base - wolverines were attracted to kill sites and worked the hunt areas into their foraging circuits.
However, it became very difficult to attract wolverines into traps during winter of —13, which they attributed mostly to the lack of new wolverines visiting the area. From images gathered on the remote cameras, it seemed the animals were too wary to be caught.
You might fool them once, but how do you fool them again after that? We got creative with different kinds of bait - we tried chickens wrapped in bacon, and big wads of beef suet. Home range estimates for wolverines in South-central Alaska show females use about to square kilometers square miles and males use about to 1, square kilometers to square miles.
Males and females traveled extensively throughout their home use areas. Both sexes occasionally went on exploratory trips and then returned to their primary areas. A look at the movements of five wolverines over the course of a year two females and three males showed great variation in distances traveled, some days they covered a lot of ground, others days not so much. The average distances traveled per day was about 12 kilometers for the females, and between eight and 21 kilometers for the males.
Because the focus of the study was movement in late winter and spring, the researchers did not track wolverines year-round. The far ranging male did provide some data in late spring — when he expanded his range even more.
0コメント