Project Coordinators:
Dr. Chris Darimont Research Scientist
Heather Bryan Biologist and PhD Candidate
Rainforest Wolves
Where else on the planet do wolves take to the sea, swimming among forested islands to feed themselves?
Where else can wolves make more than 75% of their living from marine resources like salmon, beached whales, and seals? Where else can we learn how these magnificent animals used to live, before the planet suffered extensive loss of wild wolves in most other places? In the traditional territories of several First Nations – an area known globally as the Great Bear Rainforest – wolves live a unique and precious existence, and one we work hard to safeguard.
Our Vision
Our vision is to ensure that Rainforest Wolves can continue their wild ways amidst an uncertain future marked by challenges against which they have no evolved defenses – climate change, industrial forestry, fisheries, trophy hunting, increasing marine traffic, exotic diseases, and others. We must consider carefully what wolves require in the face of these threats.
To that end, we continue to gain scientific understanding about the Great Bear Rainforest’s wolf population, we work with local communities, and we pioneer creative real-world solutions.
Our research uncovers the basics that until recently had not been documented.
For example:
- Where are the wolves in this vast archipelago landscape?
- What feeds them?
- How many of them move through these forests?
- What are the details of their evolutionary history?
All of our work goes through a rigorous and scholarly peer-review process, ensuring that our conservation recommendations are well grounded and defensible. We call this informed advocacy.
Our partnerships with local communities, especially the Heiltsuk Nation of Bella Bella, have granted us unique insight into the lives of wolves. This partnership has the additional benefit of simultaneously fostering renewed cultural interest in wolves.
And where we can, we go ‘straight to solution’ in applied conservation. In 2005, in an unprecedented move, supporters helped us buy out – and extinguish - the commercial rights to trophy hunt wolves and other carnivores in a massive portion of this landscape.
Current Project Focus
Currently, we are surveying parasitic and infectious diseases in wolves and their close relatives, dogs. As industrial activity such as logging increases in coastal B.C., natural disease cycles may be disrupted and/or new pathogens introduced that could threaten the health of wolves, other wildlife, domestic animals, and humans.
Analysis of scats for evidence of parasites, combined with molecular genetic techniques, is generating information that we are using to develop a spatially-explicit model of parasite distribution in dogs and wolves across the coastal landscape. Blood samples taken from dogs - which serve as ‘sentinels of disease’ in wolves - tell us about infectious diseases to which coastal canids have been exposed. Ultimately, we hope that this information will provide baseline knowledge for monitoring existing diseases and potential disease threats on the coast.
Scientific Papers and Reports: see side bar
