Life Lessons from a Coastal Wolf Pack

When a pack of Alaskan wolves swam to nearby Pleasant Island a little more than a decade ago, it didn’t take long for them to eat every deer on the island. That was a problem: in prior observations, wolves with no prey ultimately starve. But not Pleasant Island’s wolves; they turned to otters. And that’s not the only place wolves have demonstrated surprising “adaptive capacity.” For High Country News, Caroline Van Hemert sketches out the surprising evidence that our lupine friends won’t go supine so easily.

Though they made headlines in 2022 for their stark and rapid dietary pivot, Pleasant Island’s wolves don’t appear to be unique in their fondness for marine mammals. In Katmai National Park, for example, both wolves and brown bears have learned to stalk sea otters and seals, focusing their efforts on predictable haul-out locations during low tide. Wolves are famous for their cursorial (chase) tactics, but in some cases ambushing their prey may be more effective, as they’ve demonstrated in Katmai. Kelsey Griffin, along with Gretchen Roffler and another colleague, witnessed several instances of wolves positioning themselves near tidal streams or on rocky islets prior to successful hunts; one lone wolf even snatched a seal by the tail as it was swimming out of the creek with an outgoing tide. These strategies, the biologists argued in a study published in The Scientific Naturalist, suggest that wolves are using “planning and foresight of future events to position themselves for a successful ambush.”