Category Archives: Great Bear Rainforest Part 4: Wolves Lost in Time

Historically, the Great Bear Rainforest has been unaltered for the most part, and the wolves beneath its looming and mysterious green canopy can be thought of  as “lost in time” because of their isolation and unique morphology and ecology. In the past few decades, however, there has been increased resource extraction from this rainforest—something that many scientists and activists want to prevent.

Coastal wolves have been called the last truly wild wolves anywhere in the world.

We should take note of the gray wolf being gone from Newfoundland, Nova Scotia, and New Brunswick and work to prevent a similar fate on BC’s west coast. As is, though the wolf had once escaped endangerment due to its isolation, the coastal wolf population has been reduced by at least 80%, according to conservation biologist Dr. Reese Halter.

Habitat of the wolves includes areas of the Heiltsuk, Kitasoo-Xaisxais, Nuxalk, Oweekeno, Hartley Bay, Haisla, and Gwa’Sala-’Nakwaxda’xw First Nations.

The Heiltsuk Territory has a creation story of the wolf:

 A wolf fathers the first children of this group. One child remains a wolf and serves as a protector of the people. His siblings stay in their human form and create many of the gifts to the people including winter ceremonials, bighouses, and salmon. The mother marks the wolf father with ochre paint, giving him a reddish tinge that is still common to gray wolves of the area.

The raincoast wolves are red or salmon-colored and are a subspecies of gray wolves–genetically the most divergent population of wolves in North America. Dr. Halter notes that even the inner- and outer-coast wolves have separate DNA. According to The Gray Wolves (Canis lupus) of British Columbia’s Coastal Rainforests, by Chris T. Darimont and Paul C. Paquet, a new haplotype, or version of mitochondria, which can be thought of as a unit of variation within the genetic profile of a species, was discovered in these wolves.

 Click here for a list of gray wolf subspecies.

To the left is another subspecies of gray wolf, the Vancouver Island Wolf (Canis lupus crassodon).

These endemic gray wolves living among the coastal areas of the Great Bear Rainforest are unique in that they have adapted to the marine habitat, and their diets consist of food that comes from the sea. Some have jokingly called the inner-coast wolves marine mammals.

Nowhere else in the world have wolf diets adapted like the coast wolves’. According to the Rainforest Conservation Foundation, wolves in the Great Bear get more than 75% of their diet from salmon, beached whales, and seals (outer-coast packs, about 50%). These wolves’ territories are vast, and the animals swim up to islands in search of food, including intertidal crustaceans. Essentially they “island hop”.

According to a study by Darimont, Reimchen, and Paquet, coastal wolves approach their targeted salmon, plunge their muzzle into the water to capture the fish with their teeth, and trot to shore to consume it. About 70% of salmon are consumed on the grass near the stream or river, though sometimes a a wolf will run off into the forest with its prey.

Some fun facts, by Dr. Halter:

• The wolves eat only salmon heads that are high in omega-3 fatty acids; they have not adapted to eating salmon stomachs, which have parasites.
• The wolves of coastal BC travel across water like the way we cross streets; they can swim up to nine miles in icy water, regardless of strong currents and winds.
• Their jaws are very strong, seven times greater than ours. They use their teeth to kill their prey.
• Their sense of smell is one hundred and one million times more acute than ours.
• Wolves can catch salmon with a 30% kill rate.
• When the remains of wolf carcasses are dragged from streams into the forest, the result is up to 80% of the forest growth’s nitrogen.

Dr. Halter posted another fun memory on his blog:

One of the most remarkable mutually beneficial relationships I have ever observed in nature exists between wolves and ravens. On Pooley Island, I’ve seen ravens playing with pups by dive-bombing them! Ravens depend upon wolves as they scavenge left over kills. Wolves, on the other hand, rely upon raven alert calls to warn them of intruders. Wolves do not eat ravens.

Wolves are the largest members of the canine family, ancestors of our best friends: dogs. Wolves can be gray, reddish, white, black, or mixed and typically eat ungulates (large hoofed mammals), small game such as rabbits, and, of course, sometimes fish and other marine life. Wolves live and hunt in packs, which can vary in number between three and a couple dozen or more animals. The mother and father wolves are called the alphas, and they reside and travel with their pups and other younger or subordinate wolves. The alpha wolves are known as pack leaders.

Their communication ranges from barks, whines, snarls, yelps, and growls to howls. You may be familiar with the scene of a wolf howling beneath a full moon; typically wolves howl more when the night is lighter, such as when there’s a full moon. There is an old saying: the pack that howls together stays together. While howling is important for packs, there is a hierarchy, and sometimes low-ranking members may be punished for joining in the howl. Howling is a way for wolves to know where their packmates are, however. Howling also occurs when a hunting party of wolves returns to their pack. And then there is social howling, which is understood to bond a pack together, or even to celebrate a kill. Howling is also done to warn off predators, mark territory, and, sadly, when a wolf is lonely.

Wolves mate in early winter, gestate for 63 days, and have a litter of 4-7 pups. The pups are born blind but are cared for by the pack and the alphas until they mature, at about 10 months. Wolves can travel up to 125 miles in a day.

Wolves in the Great Bear, similar to salmon, bear, and other species, including old-growth trees, face threats every day, generally related to resource extraction (logging, hunting, and now the potential for the oil sands pipeline through the rainforest). Wolves also may be threatened by disease.

In North America, wolves were hunted to near extinction in the 1950s, but at least in BC, the wolf population has rebounded due to hunting restrictions. Recently, however, these restrictions were lifted by the provincial government–including regions west of the Fraser River on the Chilcotin Plateau. With wolf populations having come back, they are now preying on cattle and wild game, such as moose and caribou. The idea is to manage pack size and density, not to cull wolves. But, according to Dr. Parquet, who is somewhat understanding of concerns, since he is a hunter and grew up on a ranch, said:

We don’t really know what the wolf populations are, we don’t know the extent of predation compared with previous years, we don’t know at all if it’s having an effect on wild ungulates, deer and elk and moose. It harkens back to the days when wolves were hunted to extinction throughout most the United States and even threatened in Canada. This is what we were hearing in the 1950s and earlier and we’ve made a lot of progress since those days. I understand the kinds of concerns that ranchers have.

While the coastal areas are not home to many ranchers, humans are moving closer into the wolf territory there every year. Hunting is unchecked there too, fish farms may spread disease to wild salmon (which wolves eat), pollution drifting up to shore may infiltrate salmon and other marine animals that are eaten by the wolves, and overfishing is always a problem as well.

The threat of oil sands expansion is also dire. The Enbridge Northern Pipeline would cut across the Great Bear, crossing over a thousand salmon-bearing rivers and streams and gutting the sacred forest with twin pipes that would carry either oil or condensate–and, as they say, it’s not a matter of if a pipeline will erupt, but when. This pipeline would also result in 225 big crude oil tankers a year navigating the same waters the wolf hunts in for its prey. The balance of the Great Bear’s ecosystem is delicate; any oil extraction and transport would ruin it.

Here’s to hoping that the wolves that have quietly evolved on our beautiful coast are not truly lost in time, and will remain an integral part of our planet in the future.

Read more in the series:
Part 1: Oil Sands
Part 2: Ancient Realm
Part 3: The Spirit Bear