"The wolves will wade into a situation and check it out, and if it goes well, they'll keep going," Smith said. The dead female had wolf hair in her teeth and claws. The wolves killed the cougar, then found her kittens and killed them. Last month, 14 wolves caught a female cougar out in the open skulking around one of their kills. No matter which carnivore kills the elk, researchers agree that greater Yellowstone is a ruthless place where losers often pay the ultimate price. However it happened, the pecking order prevailed. Inman said it was not clear whether the bear or the wolverine killed the elk - wolverines have been known to pull it off - or whether the elk had simply thawed out after freezing to death or dying of starvation during the winter. In the wolverine's case, the competitor was a black bear. Coyotes and smaller animals either have to scavenge other animals' elk kills or settle for mouthful-sized voles, squirrels, mice and other rodents.Īn elk is a temptation that wolverines, and especially coyotes, can't resist: "If you can survive long enough to cash in on a big food source like an elk, you can eat well, produce pups and pass on your genes," Crabtree said. The cougar is a solitary hunter and prefers elk calves, but it can kill adults as well. The bears and the wolves can comfortably bring down an adult male elk. Next in the pecking order, albeit with some disagreement, come the wolves, the only predators who work in a team, followed by black bears, cougars, coyotes and smaller carnivores such as the wolverine.
The male grizzly, 7 feet tall and weighing close to 1,000 pounds, "is the king of beasts, but they're slow," said Douglas Smith, who leads the National Park Service's Yellowstone Wolf Project.
"It is probably very normal in a multi-predator, multi-prey system for predators to compete for a carcass. Geological Survey's Chuck Schwartz, leader of greater Yellowstone's Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team. "It's a toothy world out there," said the U.S. When meat-eaters have plenty to eat - and there are about 14,000 elk in greater Yellowstone, the densest population on the continent - they spend considerable time pushing one another around like bullies on a playground. "When there are wolves and coyotes, there are always going to be kills of coyotes."Īnd evidence is growing that other species are fighting and dying as well. "Things are starting to sort themselves out," said coyote specialist Robert Crabtree, of the Yellowstone Ecological Research Center. The Northern Rockies coyote population, which had the run of the park after wolves were exterminated in the 1930s, has been halved to 225 animals since the wolves returned. Nowhere else on the continent can boast such variety.Īnd all the species, with the exception of coyotes, are prospering, either protected under the Endangered Species Act or by hunting or trapping restrictions.
ADULT MALE ELK FULL
With the reintroduction of the gray wolf in 1995, the park and its suburbs now have a full complement of North America's great carnivores: wolves, grizzly bears, black bears, cougars, coyotes and wolverines. This encounter occurred April 22, an unusual example of predator killing predator in the remote reaches of greater Yellowstone Park, a 40,600-square-mile tract of wilderness spreading like an ink blot across the junction of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho.īut while the wolverine may have chosen a mismatch bordering on madness, scientists say that predators killing one another is probably part of the natural order of things, and greater Yellowstone is offering an unprecedented opportunity to test the theory. The wolverine carcass was "intact," albeit with a crushed head and bear bites all over its body. There were a few elk hairs on the ground and signs the bear had carried the elk away. "We don't know how it unfolded, except that the wolverine lost," said wolverine expert Kristine Inman, of the Wildlife Conservation Society. The slain elk, carrying as much as 550 pounds of meat, was a prize worth fighting for. The black bear had arisen from a long winter's sleep and was almost certainly very hungry. The wolverine may have been as nasty as any predator in the mountains, but it weighed only 27 pounds.
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