[That headline is from the Wildlife Conservation Society press release, printed as is. And why do Wolverines need refrigerators? The climate is getting warmer of course. – Anthony]
Will insects and bacteria consume more of the wolverine’s food if the climate warms?
Wolverines live in harsh conditions; they range over large areas of cold mountainous low-productivity habitat with persistent snow. The paper suggests wolverines take advantage of the crevices and boulders of the mountainous terrain, as well as the snow cover to cache and “refrigerate” food sources such as elk, caribou, moose and mountain goat carrion, ground squirrels and other food collected during more plentiful times of year. These cold, structured chambers provide protection of the food supply from scavengers, insects and bacteria. In addition, the refrigerated caches increase the predictability of available food resources, reduce the energy spent by females searching for food while in lactation phase, and decrease the time mothers spend away from cubs.
The paper appears in the current edition of the Journal of Mammalogy and was co-authored by Robert M. Inman of WCS, Audrey J. Magoun of Wildlife Research and Management, Jens Persson of the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, and Jenny Mattisson of the Norwegian Institute for Nature Research.
“People don’t normally think of insects and microbes as being in competition for food with wolverines,” said lead author Robert Inman of the Wildlife Conservation Society’s North America Program. “But in fact, bacteria will devour an unprotected food source if that source is available.”
Through an extensive literary review, the authors noted that wolverine reproduction is confined to a brief period of the year, and the lactation phase in females (February through April) corresponds to a period of low availability of food resources. Wolverines, which are opportunistic foragers, have adapted by amassing food caches during the preceding winter months when food is more readily available. Without the cached food supply or an unforeseen alternative (such as a winter-killed ungulate), early litter loss occurs.
Inman said, “Understanding why and how wolverines exist where they do and the various adaptations they have evolved to eke out a living will better inform population management strategies and conservation of the species.”
Climate change will play a key role in management planning for the conservation of wolverines, the authors say.
In a study published in 2010, wolverine biologists demonstrated a relationship between the areas where wolverines exist (their distribution) and persistent snow cover. The first theory advanced was that wolverines must have deep snow available in springtime so that they can give birth to their small cubs in a warm, secure den. The newly released study suggests that other factors related to climate and snow pack, such as competition for food, may also be involved in explaining the limits to wolverine distribution.
Because of their dependence on snow pack, wolverines were recently listed as warranted for protection under the Endangered Species Act due in large part to the threat of climate change reducing distribution and habitat connectivity. The authors say that a deeper understanding of how and why wolverines use snow pack the ways they do is critical to understanding how climate change will impact survival and reproductive rates.
“Shedding light on the specific mechanism of how climate will affect wolverines is important in order to know what to do to help them hold on,” said WCS’s North America Program Director, Jodi Hilty.
Inman and co-authors published a study in December of 2011 on the spatial ecology of wolverines in the Journal of Wildlife Management. This latest paper represents the second of several that will help to inform a conservation strategy for the species.
Soon to be requested: Air conditioners for polar bears, chilled water systems for Penguins, and snow machines for reindeer, because as we’ve been told, nature didn’t equip these species with adaptation genes /sarc
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Can ecologist/animal studies folks start studying changes in range of various species in response to a new ice age that (worst case) reaches a clearly identifiable (and disturbingly) unstoppable onset over as little as a 10-20 year period?
People like me need to know if wolverines will encroach upon my southern New England (USA) chicken coop, requiring me to do some reinforcement upgrades in my lifetime.
What this idiotic paper is saying is:
Meat rots quicker when warm compared to being refrigerated.
I can imagine someone thinking about 50,000 years ago that humans will need fridges if they want their food to last longer. What an utter waste of paper.
Wolverines present a particular problem for the Madison Avenue public relations firms. Remote, viscious and physically unattractive mammals do not have the tear drop capacity of sea otter, harp seals and polar bear clubs. Rebranding will require routine Hollywood make-over and a less threatening name change. Strong familial links will allow easy transition to the related bear populations. Current focus group selections include Pandarines or Kolarines. Expect happy meal action figures and interactive, life function correct stuffed cuddlies to follow. Soon the “Adopt a Pandarine” movement will be able to provide a long term solution to the insect and bactaria intrusion.
“… Because of their dependence on snow pack, wolverines were recently listed as warranted for protection under the Endangered Species Act due in large part to the threat of climate change reducing distribution and habitat connectivity …”
==============
Due to the THREAT of climate change?
The Endangered Species Act needs serious redefining. Seriously, I would say that 90% of the Act’s current interpretation needs to be eliminated. A law that is abused to the degree of the ESA is a bad law. Better none that as it stands now. Same goes with the EPA. Hell probably half of the federal agencies are built and expanded upon bogus premises such as the ESA and EPA interpretations of federal regulations. The so-called ‘environmental’ lobby will lead to the downfall of true and necessary protections.
I don’t know where wolverines live in terms of altitude, but if the world warms by 4C they will only have to move up 2000ft to find the same conditions they’re living in today.
Think Tank Update ! ! !
“Adopt a Pandarine” is judged tame and formulaic….the great success in ‘outcome based re-education’ has allowed marketing to suggest going ‘all in’ and calling this campaign just what it is….
PANDERING FOR PANDARINES !
OT but is this important? re BIAS in Mann08 by Lucia. Another nail in his hockey stick cruxificion LOL
http://rankexploits.com/musings/2012/mann08-figure-2b-do-you-see-what-i-see/
Maybe a simple posting of what she purports to have found should do.. or is it worth it? Remove posting here if you want later
All the wolverines have to do is to look out for all the pikas baking to death in the noonday sun, too stupid to move the short distance uphill to the snowline.
“But in fact, bacteria will devour an unprotected food source if that source is available.”
That’s a cracker of a quote – presumably there’s no evidence for bacteria consuming food that’s not available?
A fair number of climate scientists, conservationists and zoologists must have been born in the MWP – the Mid-late 20th.century Wonk Period., when the Good Lord was running short of fully-developed brains, and issued them preferentially to realists and sceptics.
If a wolverine can triumph over a polar bear (per Chuck L, above) we seem to have an ethical dilemma for those who feel intervention in nature is required. Which animal’s interests are wildlife specialists supposed to look out for?
At the root of all this we have a societal problem of too many funded researchers with too much time on their hands imagining that the planet can be managed.
If that brainpower were to be diverted towards something productive they could be a help to our survival rather than an annoyance. Instead we get this curious mix of self-abasement (Humans are the problem) and hubris (The Authors can help with the solution). I can only resolve that contradiction by concluding that many earnest scientists don’t believe that they are human.
Another demonstration of the (stupid) ingenuity of rent-seekers.
Sounds kooky but they’re serious and I am looking forward to their findings about how much wood would a woodchuck chuck if a woodchuck could chuck wood.
I have seen wolverines in the Milk River drainage near Malta, MT. Somehow they survive the 90-100+ F summers on lowland prairie nowhere near mountains.
Turning things around a bit to demonstrate the implicit fatuosity of the article: As the cold-phase PDO deepens some scientists will worry,
Headline: “Will wolverines consume more of the insects’ and bacteria’s food if the climate cools?
Concerned scientist: “People don’t normally think of wolverines as being in competition for food with insects and microbes,” said lead author Ibert Ronman of the Wildbug Conservation Society’s North America Program. “But in fact, wolverines will devour an unprotected food source if that source is available.”
What I find fatuous about the topic is not the impulse to study wolverines, but the opportunistic use of global warming to manufacture a specious context. One after another, all such studies have the same implicit fulcrum on which their concern is leveraged: that all species live on a razor-thin ridge of survival, and any tiny change in temperature will slide them off into the abyss of extinction.
It’s a sign of how far the normative has slipped into foolishness that such stuff is now viewed as legitimate. It’s Hannah Arendt’s thesis about the banality of evil, now operating in science. Except in science we’re not witnessing the migration of social morality into evil, but rather the migration of hard-minded scientific acuity into flabby sanctimonious cultism.
Several years ago my son was confronted by a very aggressive wolverine while tree planting in the coast range of British Columbia. He and his fellow workers ran and jumped into the box of a pickup and fended him off with shovels until he turned and disappeared into the brush. This was well below the permanent snow essentially in the rain forest (They don’t cut down sticks in BC). I’m sceptical of this confident, territorial, sturdy fellow needing much help in a forest of abundance.
I’m also sceptical of the knowledge that activist wildlife experts possess after their losing a colony of emperor penguins (later found by NASA in satellite imagery).
“Caused by climate change?
The cause of the disappearance is not clear-cut, but the EVIDENCE indicates a connection to climate change”.
http://bing.search.sympatico.ca/?q=missing%20emperor%20penguins&mkt=en-ca&setLang=en-CA
Or the devastation of certain polar bear colonies. They eventually were spotted by air
somewhere else and this final incident in a chain of failures at last took the polar bear off the main posters. Come to think of it, I haven’t heard much about the decline of the emperor penguin since this gaff either. Like the word “mistake” in social sciences (e.g. Snodgrass went on a 10 year binge of breaking and entry and armed robbery. He is sorry for his ‘mistakes’ and asked for leniency), ‘Evidence’ has lost its unequivocal meaning and is now a post normal science term to toss out in lieue of real data.
H.R. says:
July 14, 2012 at 2:33 am
I thought immature wolverines were called undergrads. Now I find I’ll have to refer to them as cubs.
O – H…
=======================================================================
I – O!
Are those cows still frozen in that shelter in Colorado? Maybe the wolverines just need a map.
I had the good fortune to see a wolverine while mountain climbing in the Alaska Range during the early 1960s. We were proceeding up a small glacial valley when we saw it moving in the same direction on the other side of the valley. It loped over the rock-strewn moraine in an almost ape-like manner, and appeared impressively powerful. Our good fortune extended further in that the wolverine seemed not to notice us.
The study is fine except for how much do they know that can be proven about the climate and how and at what rate it will change that they can devote so much energy on one outcome and determine how a species will act and call it science?
Unable to sell climate change they are now attempting to sell the consequences of climate change.
The wolverine kill elk and elk have been known to attack trucks.
Interesting that the suggestion of refrigerators for wolverines is an acceptance of adaption as a solution rather than mitigation. How can we get them to apply that reasoning to people?
Has anyone registered the RefrigeratorsForWolverines.org domain yet?
This is a “wolverines! , wolverines!” cry.
Wolverines, like many other species have survived the greatest threat possible, humans. They surely don’t need any more help from us but I suspect substantially less habitat distraction would be useful. These animals were common across North America in such places as Ontario, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Upper Michigan and so on, pre ±1880. What these “believers” seem not to understand about animals like Wolverines is their present habitat is more refuge then normal range which was much further south in the past. Hay like all of us northerners a little more warm is a welcome thing. You got to live here to understand it.
Refrigerators! What next, BBQs?
Here in California we have extensive rock glaciers. More than enough to serve our one wolverine’s refrigeration needs.
There is something to be said for providing the necessary funding to send a large number of these folks out to research the wolverine in its natural habitat. Given that that habitat is some of the most rugged and perilous available and that, in general, these folks seem to have developed their entire concept of Nature from too many repeat viewings of “Bambi” when they were children, having large numbers of them blundering about in pursuit of wolverines will greatly enhance the opportunities for “The Darwin Effect” to come into play i.e. Nature weeding out the stupid. There would seem to be a significant possibility that our future selves could be burdened by fewer examples of this kind of BS, by simply giving them exactly what they ask for and letting Nature take its course.
Wolverine = life support system for four claws.
Let’s not forget to give a figurative ‘gag me with a spoon’
every time you see them mis-use ‘Climate Change’
as shorthand for ‘Every disaster we’re predicting’.
The sheer arrogant smugness of their presumption defies reality,
for as long as they repeat it by the thousands, every minute,
‘Climate Change’ means ONLY what they want it to,
a ‘threat’ they will ‘combat’ by destroying our prosperity & freedom.