Wolves are a grizzlies best friend - at least in Yellowstone Yellowstone has become a world renowned laboratory for what can happen when long absent carnivores are returned to the landscape. For decades across North America, predators were seen as the enemy, and targeted for extermination. Bounties were paid for the pelts of wolves, coyotes and other carnivores in order to make the wilderness a more human friendly place. The program resulted in a natural system that ran amok. Food chains evolved over millions and in some cases 10s of millions of years. Every hoofed animal was partially designed by its need to escape predators that were in turn designed to eat them. In some cases, as in the case of snowshoe hare and lynx, both predator and prey evolved the same strategies. Snowshoe hares gradually developed huge back feet to enable them to stay atop deep snows and escape the lynx. In time, the lynx evolved to also have huge feet, negating the hare's advantage. As biologists, we call that co-evolution - two species evolving in concert with each other in the age-old chess match of hunter and hunted. Over time, the predator control programs were very effective over much of their range and wolves were long ago extirpated from places like the greater Yellowstone ecosystem. In their absence, nature didn't rest on its laurels. It continued to evolve based on the now more limited numbers of actors on the stage. In a 2013 study, a research study looked into what impacts removing wolves from Yellowstone may have had on other species, in particular grizzly bears. Normally, we think of animals like wolves and bears as adversaries, both competing for similar prey. Hop onto Youtube and you can find countless examples of wolves and grizzlies battling over carcasses. However when you remove the wolf, might the entire equation change? This study tried to look at what how the Yellowstone ecosystem was impacted by the removal of wolves and how it was further impacted with their return. Looking at mountain landscapes is not all about the pretty pictures that we as visitors take home. Less wolves meant, more elk. Tourists love to take photos of elk. They are one of the main large, charismatic animals that bring tour bus after tour bus into the mountain west. However we also need to remember one important fact. Elk are…what's that word again…oh yah…food! Elk are here not because they are cute and charismatic. They are here because they are made of meat. Ecosystems are a combination of predator and prey. Pressure from predation stimulates adaptation and evolution in their prey animals. This in turn forces the predators to also adapt. Take away the predator and the prey population simply explodes. This is what happened in Yellowstone. With an absence of wolves for more than 70 years, elk and deer numbers had exploded. Everything that was edible was, well, eaten. During this same time, the population of Yellowstone grizzlies also suffered. Could there be some relationship between wolves, elk and grizzly population? This study looked to quantify this relationship. We like to think of bears as carnivores, but in reality, they are omnivores. Most of their diet is made up of plants rather than meat. Uncontrolled elk numbers may have impacted the bears by simply grazing on the plants that produced berries important to those bears. This study examined the idea that taking wolves off the landscape simply changed the landscape to make it less suitable to bears. Grizzlies thrive in forests of aspen, poplar and willow because they tend to have a diverse understory of berry-producing plants like buffaloberry, Saskatoon or Serviceberry and chokecherry.  Too many elk, meant that these shrubs, and even the new shoots of aspen, poplar and willow trees were mere fodder for the endless appetite of the ever growing elk population. In the ear