In the need, the Wolf Seotter eats - at least that applies to the population on the island of Pleasant Island in Alaska: After the animals have decimated the game on the island for years, they have apparently switched to Seototter as the main source of food. It was the first time that the marine mammals would land at the top of the menu of a predator living on land, a team led by Gretchen Roffler from Oregon State University in Corvallis in the specialist magazine »PNAS«.
For a long time, sea otters and wolves hardly ever met on Pleasant Island: people almost exterminated the marine mammals in the region for the fur trade, only in recent decades has it gradually been possible to stabilize the population again. A little later - in 2013 - a larger wolf pack also set up home on the island. In order to investigate what happens when the animals naturally come into contact with each other for the first time on a larger scale on the island, Roffler's group monitored the wolves' feeding and hunting behavior from 2015 to 2021 by equipping some animals with GPS transmitters and also collecting and analyzing numerous fecal samples.
The researchers discovered that the wolves were still fed by deer in 2015: they made up around 75 percent of their food. The rest of the 25 percent of their food needs covered the animals even at the time by seater. However, this relationship began to tip over in 2017: suddenly the animals fed mainly on Ottern, while deer only lived out around seven percent of their prey. This pattern lasted until the end of the examination period.
According to the GPS data, the wolves specifically attack the sea otters when they are in shallow water or resting on rocks along the coast. "Sea otters are famous predators in the coastal ecosystem, and wolves are one of the most famous top predators in terrestrial systems," says study author Taal Levi of Oregon State in a university press release. "So it's quite surprising that sea otters have become the most important food resource for wolves. We have top predators here that feed on a top predator.«
The deer also includes losing the deer on Pleasant Island: Since the wolves feed so well from the sea sprouts that their own population does not go back, the wild stocks on the island have little opportunity to recover.
