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Alaskan Wolf found with Record Levels of Mercury Contamination
Researchers have found that the wolves of Pleasant Island have some of the highest levels of the toxic heavy metal mercury ever recorded in an Alaskan wolf. Back in the summer of 2013, a pair of Alexander Achipelago wolves (Canis lupus ligoni), a gray wolf subspecies, swam over to Pleasant Island, Alaska. This is 19-square mile rock in the Gulf of Alaska, which used to have a deer population. Once the wolves arrived on the island, which hadn’t previously had a wolf population, they quickly ate their way through the deer population and quickly grew from two wolves to thirteen wolves. Now, with more mouths to feed and no deer on the island, there was speculation from biologist Gretchen Roffler of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game about what would happen to the wolves. Would they stay on the island and starve, or maybe they would make the 2-mile swim back to the mainland? But instead to qoute my favorite fictional chaos theorist, “Life finds a way”, the wolves started to eat sea otters.
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The pack quickly learned how to kill and eat the sea otters, which made up 60 to 70 percent of their diet. The remaining 30 to 40 percent consisted of salmon, other fish, birds, and the occasional seal. While the wolves had been able to pivot and adapt to a new food source, this came with its own problems. In 2020, Roffler and her colleagues noted that one of the pack’s radio-collared females had stopped moving. Then, when they investigated this, the scientist found the wolf’s emaciated corpse lying beneath a tree. To find out why the wolf had suddenly died, a tissue analysis was performed. This revealed that this Alaskan wolf had the highest levels of mercury ever recorded in a wolf. With further research on the wolves of Pleasant Island, they found that they had mercury concentrations 278 times higher than wolves in Alaska’s interior. Showing that the consumption of sea otters had rapidly increased mercury levels in the wolves. Through biomagnification, mercury has moved up the food chain, becoming concentrated in sea otters before ending up in wolves. While it is amazing to see how resilient the natural world is, the data gathered from these wolves show that there are more pathways of mercury contamination than expected throughout Alaska’s environment.
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