Research Brief: How wolf personalities can alter wetlands

Can wolf personalities change ecosystems? According to the latest research from the Voyageurs Wolf Project, published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, they can. 

Previous work by the Voyageurs Wolf Project – which is funded by the University of Minnesota and the Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund as recommended by the Legislative-Citizen Commission on Minnesota Resources (LCCMR) – demonstrates that wolves can alter the creation of wetlands by killing beavers.  

Observations from the field indicated that some wolves were much better at ambushing and killing beavers and, in turn, altered more wetlands than other wolves.  The researchers suspected that individual wolf personalities were responsible for this pattern. Read the full brief.