In the afternoon, everyone from the Heritage and Research Center had to go up to Mammoth for mandatory radio training, a two-hour class where we learned how to use the park’s radios. For my job, I will likely never need to use a park radio, but it was interesting to learn how the radio system in the park works and how the radios work. After the radio training, the HRC interns all attended a seminar by John Vucetich, head of an ongoing study about the predator-prey relationship between wolves and moose in Isle Royale National Park in Michigan.
The lecture discussed the changing perceptions in the last fifty years about the predator-prey relationship between wolves and moose at Isle Royale National Park. At first, the relationship seemed to be top-down – that is, wolves were the dominant predators and moose the prey in the relationship. However, fifty plus years of research has proven that disease among wolves, climate change, fluctuations in availability of certain moss that moose rely on for food, and the population of ticks on the island all play important roles in the predator-prey relationship. For example, ticks are currently thriving at Grand Isle, and are preying largely on moose, therefore weakening them and making them easy targets for wolves.
After the lecture, we returned to the HRC and worked on the glass bottle rehousing for the last hour of work. With such a big break in the middle of the day, we didn’t get as much done as we would have liked, and will have a lot more to do tomorrow before we are finished with this project.
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