“Wolves help remove sick animals, but animals don’t get visibly ill for about 2 years,” he said.
Ken McDonald, chief of the wildlife division of Montana’s Fish, Wildlife and Parks Department, expressed doubts that wolves would prevent chronic wasting disease. But if the disease gets into game farms like the ones in Wyoming, “prevalence rates skyrocket to 90 or 100 percent,” said Mark Zabel, associate director of the Prion Research Center at Colorado State University. When cases of the disease among deer ranged from 5 to 50 percent in Wisconsin and Colorado, those states were considered hot spots. Many wildlife biologists say concentrating the animals in such small areas is a recipe for the rapid spread of chronic wasting disease. And just south of Grand Teton National Park lies the National Elk Refuge, where thousands of animals, displaced by cattle ranches, are fed each winter to satisfy elk hunters and tourists. There is little published research on “predator cleansing,” and this study aims to add support for the use of predators to manage disease.Ī prime concern about the spread of chronic wasting disease in the Yellowstone region is the fact that Wyoming maintains 22 state-sponsored feeding grounds that concentrate large numbers of elk unnaturally in the Yellowstone region. Preliminary results in Yellowstone have shown that wolves can delay outbreaks of chronic wasting disease in their prey species and can decrease outbreak size, Ms. By this logic, diseased deer and other animals would be the most likely to be eliminated by wolves. “Wolves have really been touted as the best type of animal to remove infected deer, because they are cursorial - they chase their prey and they look for the weak ones,” said Ms. Unless, perhaps, the park’s 10 packs of wolves, which altogether contain about 100 individuals, preyed on and consumed diseased animals that were easier to pick off because of their illness (the disease does not appear to infect wolves). Mad cow in humans causes a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, and there was an outbreak among people in the 1990s in Britain from eating tainted meat.Ĭooking does not kill the prions, and experts fear that chronic wasting disease could spread to humans who hunt and consume deer or other animals that are infected with it. The disease is part of a group called transmissible spongiform encephalopathies, the most famous of which is bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease.
The disease has spread across wild cervid populations and is now found in 26 states and several Canadian provinces, as well as South Korea and Scandinavia. It is caused by an abnormal version of a cell protein called a prion, which functions very differently than bacteria or viruses.
Can predators potentially be the solution?”Ĭhronic wasting disease, a contagious neurological disease, is so unusual that some experts call it a “ disease from outer space.” First discovered among wild deer in 1981, it leads to deterioration of brain tissue in cervids, mostly deer but also elk, moose and caribou, with symptoms such as listlessness, drooling, staggering, emaciation and death. Geological Survey and the National Park Service. “There is no management tool that is effective” for controlling the disease, said Ellen Brandell, a doctoral student in wildlife ecology at Penn State University who is leading the project in collaboration with the U.S. Experts fear that it could one day jump to humans. If the idea holds, it could mean that wolves have a role to play in limiting the spread of chronic wasting disease, which is infecting deer and similar animals across the country and around the world. Researchers are studying what is known as the predator cleansing effect, which occurs when a predator sustains the health of a prey population by killing the sickest animals. That’s the question for a research project underway in the park, and preliminary results suggest that the answer is yes. Are the wolves of Yellowstone National Park the first line of defense against a terrible disease that preys on herds of wildlife?
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