Raincoast is a team of conservationists and scientists empowered</h2><p>by our research to protect the lands, waters and wildlife of the Great Bear Rainforest.
  • Home
  • About
    • About Us
    • Raincoast Board
    • Raincoast Staff and Team Members
    • Links
    • Contact Us
  • Projects
    • Coastal Wolves
    • Marine Birds
    • Marine Mammals
    • Wild Salmon
    • Coastal Grizzlies
  • Information
    • In the News
    • Notes frm th Field
    • Reports
    • Scientific Papers
    • videos
    • Track Raincoast
  • Resources
    • Raincoast Images
    • Books
    • Research Station
    • Research Vessel
  • Get Involved
    • Subsribe to NFTF
    • Volunteer
    • Citizen Science
    • Employment Opportunities
    • Events
  • Donate
Home  →  projects » Rainforest Wolves

Rainforest Wolves

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

WolfOur 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

Wolf TrackCurrently, 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

  • Read More

    • Rainforest Wolves
    • Raincoast’s Marine Bird Program
    • Raincoast’s Marine Mammal Program
    • Raincoast’s Wild Salmon Program
    • Raincoast’s Grizzly Project
  • Scientific Papers

    Darimont, C.T., P.C. Paquet, and T.E. Reimchen. In press. Spawning salmon disrupt tight trophic coupling between wolves and ungulate prey in coastal British Columbia. BMC Ecology.

    Darimont, C.T., P.C. Paquet, and T.E. Reimchen. 2007. Stable isotopic niche predicts fitness of prey in a wolf-deer system. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society 90: 125-137.

    Hocking, M.D., C.T. Darimont, K.S. Christie, and T.E. Reimchen. 2007. Niche variation in burying beetles (Nicrophorus spp.) associated with Pacific salmon carcasses. Canadian Journal of Zoology 85: 437-442.

    Bryan, H.M, C.T. Darimont, T.E. Reimchen, and P.C. Paquet. 2006. Early ontogenetic diet of wolves. Canadian Field-Naturalist 20: 61-66.

    Paquet, P.C., S.M. Alexander, P.L. Swan, and C.T. Darimont. 2006. The influence of natural landscape fragmentation and resource availability on connectivity and distribution of marine gray wolf populations on the Central Coast, British Columbia, Canada. In Crooks, K. and M.A. Sanjayan (Eds.) Connectivity Conservation. Cambridge University Press. Cambridge, UK.

    Darimont, C.T., P.C. Paquet, T.E. Reimchen, and V. Crichton. 2005. Range expansion by moose into coastal temperate rainforests of British Columbia, Canada. Diversity and Distributions 11: 235-239.

    Paquet, P.C., C.T. Darimont, F.M. Moola, and C. Genovali. 2005. Connectivity where the land meets the sea; preserving the last of the best. Wild Earth 14: 21-25.

    Price, M.H.H., C.T. Darimont, N.N. Winchester, and P.C. Paquet. 2005. FFacts from faeces: prey remains in wolf faeces revise occurrence records for mammals of British Columbia's coastal archipelago. Canadian Field-Naturalist 119: 192-196.

    Darimont, C.T., M.H.H. Price, N.N. Winchester, J. Gordon-Walker, and P.C. Paquet. 2004. Predators in natural fragments: foraging ecology of wolves in British Columbia's central and north coast archipelago. Journal of Biogeography 31: 1867-1877.

    Darimont, C.T., T.E. Reimchen and P.C. Paquet. 2003. Foraging behaviour by gray wolves on salmon streams in coastal British Columbia. Canadian Journal of Zoology 81: 349-353.

    Darimont, C.T., and P.C. Paquet. 2002. The gray wolves, Canis lupus, of British Columbia's central and north coast: distribution and conservation assessment. Canadian Field-Naturalist 116: 416-422.

    Darimont, C.T., and T.E. Reimchen. 2002. Intra-hair stable isotope analysis implies seasonal shift to salmon in gray wolf diet. Canadian Journal of Zoology 80: 1638-1642.

    Reports

    The Gray Wolves (Canis Lupus) of British Columbia’s Coastal Rainforests by Chris Darimont and Paul Paquet. 2000. Wolf-deer systems in the Great Bear Rainforest face a significant threat from large-scale industrial clearcut logging.

    A critical assessment of the BC Central Coast Land & Resource Management Plan Dr. Paul Paquet, Dr. Chris Darimont, Dr. John Nelson and Katrina Bennett. 2004 This report is a critical assessment of protection for key wildlife & salmon habitats under the Central Coast Land & Resource Management Plan

    Preliminary Modeling of Deer Winter Range in Heiltsuk Territory of the Central Coast of British Columbia by Chris Darimont and Paul Paquet. 2003 The Raincoast Wolf Project has modeled winter range habitat for deer in Heiltsuk Territory on the Central Coast. Habitat that is important for deer is also important for wolves, other large predators.

    Yeo Island Wolf Home Site Recommendations by Chris Darimont and Paul Paquet Wolf-deer systems in the Great Bear Rainforest face a significant threat from large-scale industrial clearcut logging.

  • Notes from the Field

    In and out of Africa

    By Chris Darimont
    Research Scientist
    Rainforest Wolf Program
    Guttural roars and the cracking of bone drown out any sound of the river, which by this time of year has slowed to a mere trickle.  On its banks, blood-soaked muzzles plunge into fallen prey as if it were their final meal.  Bulbous bellies - stretched into submission - compel [...]

    Thu Dec 18, 2008
    Notes from the Field
    • Grizzly Bears
    • Wolves
    • Wild Salmon
    • Marine Mammals
    • Marine Birds
    • Home
    • About
      • About Us
      • Raincoast Board
      • Raincoast Staff and Team Members
      • Links
      • Contact Us
    • Projects
      • Coastal Wolves
      • Marine Birds
      • Marine Mammals
      • Wild Salmon
      • Coastal Grizzlies
    • Information
      • In the News
      • Notes frm th Field
      • Reports
      • Scientific Papers
      • videos
      • Track Raincoast
    • Resources
      • Raincoast Images
      • Books
      • Research Station
      • Research Vessel
    • Get Involved
      • Subsribe to NFTF
      • Volunteer
      • Citizen Science
      • Employment Opportunities
      • Events
    • Donate
    PRIVACY
    ©2008 Raincoast Conservation Foundation