Research done recently supports both sides of the issue.

Generally two things happen when wolves are introduced as an additional predator:

1. the wovles eat the "harvestable surplus" that would have died from environmental factors or disease anyway. This has been shown in Alaska and elsewhere. When wolves were removed, prey populations did not increase or continued to decline due to weather etc. This means the the prey population was experiencing "compensatory mortality" which means that the wolves were killing animals that would have died anyway from other factors.

2. wolf mortality is in addition to other sources of mortality. This happens in populations that are mainly stablized by predation, meaning predation is the most limiting factor to prey numbers, not weather or anything else. This is called "additive mortality". In this case wolf predation can hurt population numbers, however, numerous studies show that wolf removal only helps prey populations a little bit, to really increase prey population, multi-species predator removal has to occur (bear, cougars also etc. ).

The main lesson in this is: predators should not be blamed first for elk decline...habitat must be looked at first as the main factor.

Also, let us not forget the benefits of predation on an elk herd.

1. usually older, younger, or sick animals are killed. This increases production of the female prey species, and can increase the fitness of calves if they escape. This means smarter calves that are less likely to get killed in the next years.

2. predation tends to disperse large groups of prey, this reduces the chance of communicating disease, and stimulates prey species to occupy new habitat and disperse to new areas where they can get more food and reproduce more.

3. predation allows for less dense populations. This means more food is available per indivdual elk and may reduce competetion with other species like deer or cattle. This means less elk but bigger bulls.

4. wolves will only kill elk up to a certain point. when elk herds get low, they will either switch to other prey or leave the area where hunting is better. Allowing elk to be even more productive in the absense of that predator.

5. if elk populations are high, additional predation will lower populations below carrying capacity, where you will have less total elk, but the yearly surplus or growth rate of the population will be much higher and more calves will be produced each year.

6. wolf removal only helps if the elk population is already below carrying capacity (limited by food) with room to increase. If it's not then wolves are only eating elk that would have died anyway (from starvation, disease etc.).