So the wolf moose research project on Isle Royale National Park is the longest study of its kind. It's the longest continuous study of any predator prey system in the world. It began in the year 1959 and for that entire time span the focus of the research project has always been the same which is to understand how and why wolf and moose populations fluctuate the way they do. In the last 10 or 15 years, we know that the wolf population has declined precipitously, down to just the last two, and we know that the cause of that decline is inbreeding.
It turns out to have been an unexpected, indirect consequence of climate warming. Ice bridges have formed from time to time on Isle Royale. They connect Isle Royale to the mainland, mostly Canada, but also to Minnesota.
And when those ice bridges form, well then sometimes a wolf will come from the mainland to Isle Royale. And that provides an infusion of new genes, and that mitigates this inbreeding. In the 1960s, for example, ice bridges formed in about three out of every four winters.
And today, ice bridges now form, on average, about once a decade. With wolves being low, this has had a secondary consequence that's really quite important, and that's that the moose population has increased greatly. In the same time frame that the wolf population has declined, moose have increased about three-fold. and moose abundance has definitely had effects on the forest.
And the one concern is that it could have long-term effects on the forest that are not easily undone. And so that's why there's some interest in restoring wolf predation as promptly as possible. Lake Superior is the largest freshwater lake by surface area in the world.
It contains 10% of the world's liquid fresh water. The amount of ice that forms on a lake is very strongly tied to winter air temperature, which is not a huge surprise, right? Warmer winters result in less ice, colder winters result in more ice.
So climate change is affecting the Great Lakes. Ice formation on these lakes is very sensitive to even small changes in air temperature. Just a couple of degrees Fahrenheit can be the difference between a high ice cover year, where ice bridges form, for instance, and low ice cover years, where there's essentially very little open lake ice. Prior to 1998, more often than not, there was substantial ice on the lake.
And after 1998, more often than not, there is very little ice. And so the lake is behaving differently than it did just a few decades ago. I think what's really important for people to remember is that our Royal National Park is 99.9% wilderness.
So to step in and do anything that has a specific man-made impact on the landscape is something you're just... going to do without talking about it and looking at it very specific to the circumstances of our Royal National Park in this case. So for the Park Service and all these major natural resource decisions, it's law, policy, regulations, regulation and science and the public.
In the policy case of the Park Service, we actually had conflicting policy in a sense, because on one hand you have the wilderness policy that says let things kind of evolve on their own, and on the other you have if there's been human-caused impacts to an ecosystem, then it's all right to take steps to mitigate those impacts. What we've agreed to do is restart that population, and with the best advice on how you. you do it genetically, and numbers, and kind of the placement. And once we start it, we're not going to step in again.
We're going to see if that best science and best knowledge and our logic that we put together will bear out. Our Royal and to a degree Yellowstone have been good examples of what can happen to an ecosystem when you don't have top-level predators. The most prominent in North America of course is the wolf and wolves are eradicated in Yellowstone in 1926. So most of the 20th century we saw what happens when there were no predators.
The elk population burgeoned and it had strong impacts on the grasslands and the woody vegetation and those had spin-off effects but that reverberated through the system because top-level carnivores were either eliminated or reduced. We've seen the ecosystem change and become restored here in Yellowstone. We're seeing it fall apart on our oil.
So the fingerprints of humans are all over this wolf production. So I was asked to be an advisor for the Iowa Royal Wolf reintroduction. Having done it here 25 years ago and having worked on Iowa Royal for 15 years myself, it gave me familiarity not only with the island, the situation, but it also gave me familiarity with the techniques and practices of reintroducing wolves. Let's go! Let's get her, that's really good.
She'll do it fast once she gets to the open. Yeah, let's do that. Alright, let me dart his coin.
Many guys need to know their defense. Dutch it, Dutch it! I got a birdie. Nice job, Doug. There is confusion between a national park and a wilderness area.
In the case of Isle Royale, 99% of Isle Royale is both a national park and a wilderness. The importance for the wilderness... distinction is that it provides the most permanent level of protection our country is capable of giving to federal public lands with that wilderness designation. If we really want an area to retain its wild character, we have to put limits on ourselves.
We cannot be meddling and manipulating these areas all the time and have that wild character remain. And that's kind of the essence of the Wilderness Act is to protect that wild character in perpetuity. Wilderness Watch has always believed that the appropriate role for the wolf project on Isle Royale is to let the wolves decide.
We believe that it flies in the face of the humility and restraint that the Wilderness Act directs us to use on this issue. My fear is that the Isle Role Wolf experiment is going to set a really bad national precedent that will make it easier for at least the National Park Service, if not all four federal agencies, to manipulate the wildness out of wilderness across the country. I don't understand what the debate is about, well, we need to let nature take its course. We interfered with that course in a huge way. So what do we do?
Just let it go now that we've launched it, now that we've changed it? it, we know what nature used to be like through our science. So the question is, do we help or we just walk away and say philosophically we need to let nature be, wilderness be?
Well what does that look like nowadays? The purpose of a national park is to protect ecosystem health. And if ecosystem health can be protected by humans keeping their hands off of it, wonderful. But there may be some occasions where human intervention is required to maintain ecosystem health. But you see a moose population is like a freight train.
It has an enormous amount of momentum. And when you put wolves there, it doesn't just instantly turn things around. It will take a little while for the wolf population to have its effect. And the one question is, has too much time passed?
Will the reintroduction take place quickly enough to prevent moose from damaging the forest that is their food supply? That we probably won't know for sure for quite a few years. It might even take a decade to know for sure.
I think what bothers me is that We wait too long and we get into the crisis sometimes before we start to tinker when your best science says that there's a problem. I think that if we're smart, we will always learn from our history and always base our future on the best science of the time. So when to step in and do that tinkering is a pretty critical question. Climate change is this hurricane, and we've got a candle up, and we're trying to keep that candle burning. To be honest, I mean, nature's on the run, and we did that.
Wolves are on the run. on the run. Where can we have them now? Where's a good place for wolves? Where's a good place for nature?
Where's a good place for functioning ecosystems? And so it's just to sit back and say, I'm going to take hands off and I'm going to let nature take its course. We don't have that luxury anymore. We did it. We messed it up.
We're in the middle. We've got to stay there and help us get this way out of it. Yellowstone is one of the best places in the continental United States for wolves. So is Iowa oil.
Nature is declining. Where can we save it? You've got to go to the places that it's savable.
Yellowstone's one, Iowa oil's another.