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ORIGINAL: MThunter
From what I've heard, you can't keep a collar on a wolverine long enough to gain very much data. Now if you're doing implants then that's a different story.
I'm all for the live trapping methods, but if we are paying via grants for someone to be on site to build the traps, and perform all of the scientific aspects of doing this type of study, we are taking about a lot more money than setting some traditional traps. You could just as easily use some # 4 or 5 leg traps and check them every day.
If trapping data from Montana is as useless as you say, then checking in trapped wolverines has no purpose and FWP is wasting money performing this service. The fact that a similar number of wolverines are trapped each year, often in similar locations, suggests at least to me a healthy population. If the number of wolverine trapped tailed off dramatically, then maybe we could derive the need for further protection under federal standards.
Anyway I hope you find more money for your project. I'm highly interested in anything related to wolverine management, so I'd like to hear where and what you're doing.
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Good points.
Collars have come a long way, and have dramatically come down in cost since I've written my research proposal. I can't speak to a specific example but a percentage of collars is always lost/broken regardless of which species you're putting them on, and mustelids are harder on things than most. The ease or difficulty of a particular research method doesn't necessarily render it invalid or useless.
We are both trappers and so we both know that leghold traps most likely will not hold a wolverine and oftencause severe damage to the leg caught which will likely result in slow death.
The benefits of the current live trap design are hard to ignore:
1. Very low likelihood of injuringthe animal.
2.Animalscan't escape.
3. Only basic hand tools required, no packing traps, dirt,stakes, etc
4.Collar signals that the trap has been tripped, eliminating the need to visually check traps every day.
5. the animal is in a contained area making it very easy to deliver immobilizing drugs.
6. live trap design is much more effective when built by the average technician, as many of them have a total lack of trapping knowledge/skills. This in part justifies the larger time investment.
Immobilization via drugs, taking morphological measurements, putting on collars, taking genetic samples, and giving the reversal drug is a process that puts alot of stress on the animal. Having the added stress of being in a leg hold trap for ~24 hours would likely result in a high rate of mortality.
Live traps are made of on site materials and while being enclosed is stressful, it's arguably less stressful and less painful than being in a leg hold trap. Also, the response time in a live trap is less as there is a signal when it's tripped etc.
Trapping data will never give a population estimate, and is at best and very poor index of population trends due to huge variations in trapping effort, methods, and a whole host of uncontrollable or unknownvariables. It's basically used because harvest data is about all they
can get currently, and can be helpful in terms of general inferences aboutpopulation agestructure etc.However,in terms ofdetermining actual number of animals on a landscapeit's of questionablevalue to say the least.
In my experience it's been used more to contact individual trappers to glean observational accounts and determine where study efforts might be best served, which in itself creates bias but that is another issue.
Waiting until trapping numbers drop dramatically to investigate federal protection would likely be too late. Again this varies by ecology of the species in question and low density, low birth rate species are often all but gone before we clumsily detect a problem.
Please comment to USFWS about wolverine status change
