Rare Image of Wolverine Taken
Student Snaps Picture of Animal While on Weasel Mission
Grad student Katie Moriarty was on a mission to photograph weasels in the Sierra Nevada when she came across a wolverine, thought to have left the region years ago.
A graduate student at Oregon State University recently came across wolverines occupying the Sierra Nevada region, an area in which scientists believed the animals no longer dwelled. This discovery was reported by Katie Moriarty, a grad student who was on a research project in the California region who was photographing weasels. Such a finding is now raising questions of whether or not the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services should reconsider land-use decisions of the area if the animals are put on the endangered species list.
Wolverines were believed to have been driven out of the Sierra Nevada several years ago due to increased human activity. This was until Moriarty snapped her picture on a motion-and-heat-detecting digital camera. The photo was taken between Truckee and Sierraville in the northern part of the mountains for the U.S. Forest Service‘s Pacific Southwest Research Station, which scientists say is an even more unlikely place to spot a wolverine, considering they should be found only in the southern part of the range, preferring high elevations with limited development. The discovery on the morning of Sunday, March 2nd was shocking, since the only animal she hoped to find was a marten, a type of brown weasel that she was tracking as the purpose of the trip.
Wolverines are members of the weasel family and are among the largest of their species. They have brown fur on their back, a pale brown stomach and a light stripe down each side. Though mainly scavengers, they have large teeth and a powerful set of jaws and five large claws on each paw. Their paws are large to equip them to walk in snow. Males weigh up to 50 pounds while females weigh about 30 pounds. Their average life span is about seven years though they can live to be 13-years-old. They spend most of their lives moving around, sometimes covering up to 40 miles per day in search of food. Their territory stretches from Alaska, where they are most abundant, through the Canadian wilderness reaching as far as the eastern United States at one time.
While Moriarty’s picture is the first proof of a wolverine seen in the area in so many years, others have claimed to have seen wolverines. After taking the picture, Moriarty sent it to Forest Service research ecologist Bill Zielinski who confirmed the finding and the validity of the photo itself. The Fish and Wildlife Service are now planning to look for the wolverine in the picture to get a DNA sample to determine its origin. They believe the animal is a descendant of California who immigrated from Washington or Idaho or was a captive that had been released into the wild. The Fish and Wildlife Service plans to announce whether or not they will decide to begin to look into classifying wolverines as an endangered species in the near future.
