Wolverine - Melting away with the snow? NPL / Pete Cairns

By Matt Walker
Editor, Earth News The wolverine, a predator renowned for its strength and tenacious character, may be slowly melting away along with the snowpack upon which it lives. Research shows wolverine numbers are falling across North America. Their decline has been linked to less snow settling as a result of climate change. The study is the first to show a decline in the abundance of any land species due to vanishing snowpack. Details of the wolverine’s decline are published in Population Ecology. The wolverine lives in boreal forest across Scandinavia, northern Russia, northern China, Mongolia and North America, where it ranges mostly across six provinces or territories of western Canada. … It has evolved for life on the snowpack, having thick fur and outsized feet that help it move across and hunt on snow. Wildlife biologist Dr Jedediah Brodie of the University of Montana, in Missoula, US, wondered how climate change might be having an impact on snowpack levels, and on the animals that depend on it. … In all bar the Yukon, he found that snowpack depth declined significantly between 1968 and 2004. Other studies have shown corresponding rising temperatures and declining precipitation across much of the western US. “It occurred to me that a good first place to look for ecological impacts of that snowpack decline would be with a snow-adapted species like the wolverine,” Dr Brodie told the BBC. “Fortuitously, Canada has good records of both snowpack trends over time as well as trends in the harvest of all sorts of fur-bearing animals.” So Dr Brodie and Professor Post examined the records of wolverine numbers caught by fur trappers over the same period. They found a striking correlation between declining snowpack and falling numbers of the predator. “In provinces where winter snowpack levels are declining fastest, wolverine populations tend to be declining most rapidly,” the researchers wrote in the journal article. … “But we don’t have to just sit back and watch climate change drive animals extinct,” he says. “As climate change worsens, we should reduce trapping levels and also disturbance to boreal forest habitats. “Reducing the impact of these anthropogenic stressors could help ‘offset’ the impacts of climate change on wolverines.” …

Wolverine numbers ‘melting away’