The Elusive Wolves Of The Sea (Wildlife Documentary) | Natural Kingdom | Real Wild

[Music] in a remote corner of canada an amazing secret is being revealed an animal that modern science had no idea existed a new culture of wolves once the earth's greatest four-legged land predator roamed the entire northern hemisphere but its relationship with humans is like oil and water and for centuries it was the wolf who became the hunted everywhere that is except here [Music] this is a place where you're not likely to be killed by a human being in great contrast to everywhere else where wolves still exist today [Music] they may not be living exactly as they were two three thousand years ago but what has evolved has been a natural evolution lost in time in one of the last wild places on earth is it possible that here and only here wolves still live the way wolves once everywhere did how unique are they how have they survived what are the secrets of the coast wolf [Music] [Applause] [Music] on the extreme edge of northwest british columbia the pacific ocean collides with the coast mountains to create a global hot spot of biodiversity hugging 500 kilometers of coastline are the most pristine rainforest left in north america and an archipelago of over a thousand islands it is one of nature's final frontiers but so far no one really knows what here is it has never been fully studied by science for the past decade ian mcallister a founder of the raincoast conservation society has navigated thousands of kilometers of this coastline fighting to save these ancient rainforests from industrial logging his preferred weapon is science and uses it to learn how this poorly understood ecosystem works and when it doesn't when we first started work up here it was really based on exploration there was a you know fair amount of work being done on salmon the yearly counts of salmon but for virtually all of the terrestrial components to this coastline there was very very little information at over sixty thousand square kilometers this is an area larger than ireland so it's easy to understand why information was scarce raincoast first decided to study grizzly bears a key species and an entry point to understanding the entire ecosystem but instead of answers they discovered a new mystery we realized that there were some big gaps in our knowledge in particular the the outer coastal island areas and the reason for that is that we would have grizzly bear biologists working in these valleys and they wouldn't see any grizzly bears they would be seeing wolves okay there's three really easy almost what puzzled them most was how the wolves got there really this conflict exists with the forest companies some islands were 15 kilometers from the mainland and it was thought that wolves didn't like to swim it was a mystery begging for an answer and so in 2000 mcallister along with dr paul paquette one of the world's leading wolf experts and chris daramond a biologist at the university of victoria spearheaded the rainforest wolf project we think that the historically the coastal wolf was probably found from northern california to southeastern alaska what makes this place so special is that those wolves are still here and they're here and pretty much intact habitat that we can't find anywhere else wind's in our favor and the rain really keeps the smell close to the ground it doesn't move around too much so it's maybe a good time to see some walls it would become the most comprehensive study of its kind hundreds of days were spent in the field but what really excited these scientists was how the coast wolf had adapted to the sea i've never seen wolves elsewhere swim the way that the wolves here do and do it regularly and and seem seemingly without concern and it's because water is so predominant in their environment it's everywhere and they've adapted to it wolves everywhere in the world like to move in north america they've been known to travel up to a hundred thousand square kilometers to find food or a mate [Music] here they just learned how to swim for it but the coast wolf's amazing adaptation to water didn't begin or end on a beach [Music] before the work we did nobody had systematically catalogued what the wolves were doing and uh how uh effective they were at fishing and so on that and that's a new contribution and what we found is that they're very very good preying on spawning salmon the scientists also learned that fishing season was the perfect time to observe wolves in the open the annual salmon spawn is a time of daytime between animals everything is focused on fattening up for winter and the feast is endless but coast wolves it seems are picky eaters if this uh fish is swimming up the creek wilson's just trot in and grab right here with their teeth and just yank you know up to a 10 15 20 pound salmon out of the creek and it's still riding back and forth and they'll flop it down they'll put their paws on it and they'll just pull this open it right up and take off the head the scientists believe that they ate only the heads to avoid harmful parasites in the body [Music] it was more evidence of a long-term relationship between wolves and the sea but how long had it been here to find out they had to travel back in time we actually follow in the footsteps of walls pick up what they leave behind these scaps and extract and amplify the dna to ask questions about their evolutionary history and about which wolf was here where and when dna the double helix of the genetic code the fundamental building block of life what could it reveal about the secret life of the coast wolf [Music] um [Music] on the remote northwest coast of british columbia researchers had spent years unlocking the secrets of a new culture of wolves part of their success was due to some unique non-invasive study techniques in the past science had often relied on traps or tranquilizers to study animals up close but paul paquette and chris daramond believed that seeing wasn't everything to learn even more they collected scat based dna in the human world genetic fingerprinting has proven everything from guilt or innocence to the birth parents of a lost child [Music] in the wolf world thousands of scat samples were collected to help determine population sizes how often wolves travel between islands even its evolutionary history many people wonder well how on earth is your dna in scat and what happens when the food that the wolf has eaten makes its way through the digestive tract it picks up cells from the intestinal lining and out those cells come with the scat so in the scat here there are literally thousands of skin cells from the wolf and of course in every cell is the dna this is the first stage of a complicated process the second stage is a thousand miles in a world far removed from the british columbia coast here jennifer leonard a geneticist at the university of california in los angeles uses more cutting-edge science to decipher secrets hidden in the coast wolf's dna once we get the feces in the lab we first extract dna from the feces and then we take that and we can sequence it and read each base pair individually and once we get all those sequences we can compare them with the other wolves from all over the world it was the ultimate secret researchers knew the coast wolf was unique but to find out how unique it really was leonard analyzed sequences in its genetic code called haplotypes a haplotype is just a version of a genetic material usually dna [Music] in this case what we're studying is the mitochondrial dna which is a kind of dna that's only passed from the mother to all of her children inside the womb as cells replicate during reproduction genetic code in the mother's mitochondrial dna is transferred as this cycle repeats itself over thousands of years mutations occur and are inherited as a new haplotype more haplotypes in the dna of an animal population means the more genetically diverse it is something that can only occur undisturbed in the wild over a long period of time but wolves have been hunted for centuries and although genetic fingerprinting has identified 35 different haplotypes as populations decreased so did the number of mothers so far the largest number of haplotypes found in a single population is five and that made leonard's results incredible almost impossible all of canada and alaska that's been surveyed only have five haplotypes so finding 14 haplotypes in just the coastal wolves of bc was very surprising we expected one and maybe two haplotypes and having 14 was vastly beyond what we imagined all these are north american wolves the results didn't prove the coast wolf had changed incredibly they proved that it hadn't but it had changed in the rest of north america where hunting and habitat loss had decimated populations it is becoming more clear that the state of very high genetic diversity that we find in british columbia is most likely the ancestral state and that it isn't that the british colombian wolves are strangely high in genetic diversity but that the other populations are strangely low [Music] it was stunning clinical proof of what had been observed in the field an ancient wolf living in the 21st century but why here as wild as it is humans have lived here too for thousands of years except that here a unique relationship exists between wolves and humans they share the same territory and wolves are not hunted for any reason we're all related to wolves if i come into the company of a wolf i'm not to harm it i'm to speak to it even if from my heart and i'm to explain to it why i'm in its company and i ask it for protection we regard them as our brothers and our sisters our working hypothesis uh at this time is that these wolves have maintained genetic diversity because they've not been persecuted to the extent of uh wolves in other worlds in north america throughout the world it was something that couldn't be said about wolves anywhere else [Music] this is a different they've sort of gone on their own evolutionary route here on the coast [Music] there's probably hundreds or thousands of other taxa or organisms that are also different on the coast so in that way the wolves become an entry point to understanding a bigger system [Music] but after an exhaustive study of the coast wolf scientists are now in a race against time to protect this entire ecosystem fifty percent of the british columbia coast has already been logged soon it could happen here too when you consider that this is the the genetic evolution of the product of genetic evolution spanning uh 70 80 million years and and yet we can take down so much forest in such a short period of time that that definitely feels wrong nowhere else in the world does an intact wolf culture exist but as rare as it is just like its home range the last temperate rainforest on earth is this where it will make its final stand [Music] it was time to leave science behind and explore on our own the secret world of nature's greatest land predator [Music] raw remote and so far almost untouched by humans british columbia's northwest coast may be the most pristine ecosystem on earth there are no roads and the forest canopy is too thick so our search for the coast wolf will be done exclusively by boat the scientists who studied wolves here spent almost five years and traveled thousands of kilometers our crew is only a few weeks to find and film these rare elusive animals it's a tough challenge wolves are notoriously difficult to film they travel vast distances rarely stay in one place long and are extremely nervous of any human contact the home range of the coast wolf may be unique but there are no guarantees they will be in the same locations they were studied last year traveling deep into this thousand island archipelago is a journey back in time on the surface it's easy to understand how these wolves have withstood the impacts of progress here it seems everything has rugged primitive and extremely difficult to access it's too isolated for hunting and still too expensive to log it's a wild ancient world where time it seems has literally stood still once old-growth northern boreal rainforests the rarest forest type on earth carpeted the entire west coast from california to alaska today the last virgin stands of sitka spruce and western red cedar exist only here [Music] some are over a thousand years old as far as we know wolves have lived here too for about 10 000 years however new science has suggested that the last great ice age may have missed the far western edge of north america so it's possible that they've lived here even longer we've traveled north for over a week and every promising site has been a disappointment evidence of wolves is everywhere but there are no fresh tracks or kills now the first big storm of the fall is brewing in the pacific and our crew is getting frustrated but at least now it's also obvious why this coastal ecosystem is one massive rainforest they land on an island about a kilometer from the mainland and our cameraman a veteran wildlife cinematographer decides to try a howl and suddenly there they are an alpha male and two curious teenagers their fur is the ochre color unique to the coast wolf healthy but nervous they retreat quickly into the forest as soon as they catch our scent it's unlikely they'll be back after a hundred tough wet kilometers a thirty second glimpse is no success at all and so the crew continues north to an island they've heard of near canada's border with alaska this island is almost 20 kilometers from the mainland an almost impossible distance but as science has already confirmed this wolf likes to swim and fish for its dinner it's also possible that they rode the tides to travel this far out and now it may be too far to swim back finally our crew finds the evidence they've been looking for fresh salmon carcass there are wolves here and they've been fishing on this estuary today by nightfall an observation blind has been set up and the crew settles in suddenly the wait is over in the black of night our cameraman is caught off guard he's alone in the blind and it seems that the resident wolves have decided to let this intruder know whose territory this is okay i've got these walls surrounding me here there's five wolves and they're not afraid of me he may have a night vision camera but he's still at a distinct disadvantage [Music] i've got the night vision on i bear sprayed one of them and they're still circling [Music] probably the only other large mammal [Music] here other than the wolves it may be the first time wolves anywhere have been filmed at night behavior never observed before and these wolves are behaving boldly it's an unexpected unnerving success and for the rest of this night there will be no sleep [Music] so for all animals that live on this small island outpost this estuary is the source of all life [Music] it looks as if a family of four wolves lives here an adult or alpha male two females and a lone pup [Music] they know our camera is located just across the estuary but clearly they don't seem to care if they did they'd be invisible [Music] but this pack looks relaxed they're the ones in charge here in the fall life on this island is as good as it gets a time when wolves can eat sleep and play all day wolves are extremely social and family is everything play time reinforces the bond and relieves any tensions in the pack since time began here life on the estuary has depended on two constant primordial rhythms the rise and fall of the sun and the tides on average these are 23 foot tides rising and falling every six hours at over four feet an hour water rushes in and out constantly only at the peak of high tide does the ocean seem to take a break [Music] it's a rare moment of calm and a good time for harp seals to navigate upstream to fish [Music] while ducks geese and many other shorebirds patiently wait for the inevitable [Music] and then the ocean rushes out again this intertidal zone between land and sea is a rich feeding ground it's good hunting for the birds although shellfish stranded by the tide always make for a challenging meal for about eight months of the year the wolves here are also quite capable of scrounging a needle from these shallow tidal pools but in the fall they too feast in the stream every study at the coast guard has revealed the same thing although the bulk of their diet is similar to their continental cousins like all animals here they eat a lot of salmon coast wolves will hunt deer even bare but on this island where they seem to be the only large land mammals without this annual surge of salmon they couldn't survive and right now this stream is packed with them eager to spawn [Music] after a four-year journey across thousands of kilometers of pacific ocean these mature salmon are exhausted and the wolves pick them off with ease in the native legends of the northwest it is the raven who brought light to the world breathe life into man and convince the salmon to come to this coast now the raven watches the wolf closely who in tribute always leaves in a meal thousands of years of evolution has taught the great blue heron to stand perfectly still and wait for a fish to come to it and so does this adult female these salmon weigh about 15 pounds but the wolves make quick work of them puncturing the skull and killing them instantly as science has confirmed they eat only the heads some think it's because they can't digest parasites in the body cavity but the head does contain the highest fat content as fearless as they are the adults have remained protective of their pop and kept it far away from our camera but it's not just these new unknown intruders that worry them the alpha male has spied a lone wolf entering the estuary it's probably just looking for a free lunch but the alpha is in no mood to share his fish they may have fought before or perhaps the lone wolf is naturally cautious either way he won't confront the alpha today an alpha will defend his pack or territory against any intruder it's another behavior that's rarely been filmed and incredibly this alpha knows we're watching [Music] once again after dark the wolves grow even more competent darkness is their true domain and if our crew is smart they'll retreat to their tent and wait for mourning but before they can react the pack is back we've got the pack of wolves here again [Music] and they're creeping around here somewhere whoa it's all right you're okay let's be friends you settle down twigs snapping of course around my tent get get out of here [Music] more than any other animal the wolf is a creature of myth and mystery from the grimm brothers to walt disney the big bad wolf has had a unique grip in our imagination [Music] but in the native legends of coastal british columbia wolves are neither wicked nor violent [Music] one legend tells the tale of a hunter who lived on these islands every night he left his wife only to return at dawn with fresh game his wife wondered why he was such a great hunter and soon learned he could transform himself into a wolf the supreme hunter of the night at night wolves are indeed transformed in a world dependent on scent and sound their amazing eyesight makes night time their time it's now pitch black wolves have never been filmed feeding at night and they go about their business as if it were broad daylight hunting fishing and eating [Music] the wolfman's wife bore him four children all wolves but one night she heard laughter in her home the pups had removed their fur cloaks and become human the woman felt deceived that her children too could be transformed and in her anger she threw three furs into the fire the fourth pup escaped and became the coast wolf but the others with no fur for warmth or strong jaws and swift feet remained merely human at night in the company of wolves it's easy to feel merely human where can you see with that camera just just chill just chill just chill just get the bear spray ready no other animal would investigate humans like this actively curiously and in total control oh my god here perhaps only here the historic relationship between wolves and humans has been reversed because here it's the human's turn to be wary of the wolves just chill just chill she growler that was a growl dude watch where right here [Music] for a lot of reasons sunrise is now our camera crew's favorite time of day [Music] it's also low tide and with the salmon exposed and vulnerable eagles and shorebirds have arrived right on time [Music] and so of the wolves but today is different for the first time the whole pack has come to fish as a family this female is the pack teenager she's at least two years old but still an awkward hunter young coast wolves have a much lower mortality rate than wolves on the continent but they still need to eat about three times as much protein as adults the rich seafood diet here explains a lot about their high survival rate but fishing skills are not instinctive the alpha male shows his daughter how it's done wolves are the most intelligent of all land predators but they still need to learn how to be wolves and this teenager is learning well physically an adult wolf is the size of a large dog but a lot leaner these are endurance animals built for the long distance kill packs hunt by running their prey down pursuing it until it's too exhausted to resist but for a coast wolf at least during the salmon run there's no need for a long hunt here the fishing is very good [Applause] the pup of the pack is about a year old and he has a lot to learn right now he doesn't even want to get his feet wet his mother waits and watches patiently like all mothers she knows he can do it and she's right he quickly dashes across and gets a warm nip of approval as a reward the mother too is a proficient deadly hunter now it's the pup's turn to watch closely and then practice his own technique adults can go days without eating but when they can they will eat up to one-fifth their body weight or about 18 pounds at one time to survive the lean winter months ahead gorging now could make the difference between life or death but in good times or bad a pack will rarely fight over food and adults will never snatch food from a pop if this one doesn't catch on soon and start fishing on his own he too might not survive odds are he will just like his sister has wolves are nature's prime social carnivores its behavior totally unique to wolves for all others on this island it's everyone for himself no one knows how long this pack has been here but as long as it has it's depended on the sea for survival it's the living proof our crew was looking for of a unique ancient culture of wolves alive and well on canada's remote northwest coast after weeks filming wolves on a tiny island in the remote northwest corner of british columbia our camera crew is starting to believe that it's the wolves who are watching them the best example so far of their uncanny confidence is to allow their pop to play exposed and in broad daylight it's clear these wolves have no reflex of fear of humans but we're not so sure that our humans still don't have a reflex of fear of wolves [Music] fall is advancing rapidly towards winter while the salmon run is slowing down [Music] spawned out and exhausted they make an easy meal another scientific breakthrough here is a new understanding of the contributions salmon make to the health of the rainforest itself as their carcasses rot nutrients especially nitrogen are deposited in the soil this annual exchange between land and sea is a good reason why these rainforests are so fertile the pup too has progressed quickly and this fish is the first he's caught all in his own if he's going to fatten up to survive the winter ahead he needs to hurry up and catch even more soon enough the spawn will end and all the wolves here are now eating as much as they can a wolf's natural life is about 10 years but many die prematurely from disease or infection they can bleed to death from a cut on the tongue a sharp fish bone or porcupine quill can infect and kill them as a result it's quite possible that by spring it will be the young moves who survived for now all their parents can do is teach them everything they can as fast as they can wolves use three known methods of communication howling posturing like bearing their teeth and scent marking scent marking is poorly understood by science we think it's used to warn both the pack and intruders where a home territory begins and ends but if this message delivered personally is too subtle for our crew the alpha has another way of letting us know whose island this is the crew has set up this microphone to record the natural sound of the estuary hey that's enough that's enough don't make me come out there the jaws of a wolf can exert a crushing pressure of 1500 pounds per square inch more than twice that of a large dog hey the manual doesn't say how much pressure the microphone can resist but we're pretty sure it's less than fifteen hundred pounds okay hey now hey now don't eat the mic the alpha makes short work of it it's a five thousand dollar meal [Music] the crew sets the microphone up a second time and again the alpha approaches but this time he's figured it out to claim his prize he needs to cut the microphone cable it's another amazing display of behavior and intelligence it's also the clearest message yet that wolves are the dominant species here [Music] what [Music] but after sunset the pack has another surprise [Music] don't be surprised if they come around [Music] tonight almost every night our crew has had an unnerving visit from the pack that's made sleep a luxury [Music] the weather hasn't helped either their main night vision camera has been damaged by rain and salt water now a single backup camera is all they have left what's that noise but tonight the pack isn't interested in the crew they're interested in the crew's inflatable zodiac where holy he's going to town on the zodiac grab the handheld watch that can't get her that's the hose from the boat yeah this guy looks to chew on he's just sending messages where's the other one whoa how you doing big guy hey there you're a pretty wolf stand by stand by just hang on okay now it's the crew's turn to be curious why would the wolves attack their boat chewed up microphones a damaged zodiac we may have just worn out our welcome and the next morning it is over [Music] time to let these wolves get on with simply being wolves [Music] their future however remains a big question mark but if humans don't empty these waters of salmon or destroy these rainforests with commercial logging or a natural disaster or disease doesn't upset their island paradise then they just might survive the coast wolf is the rarest wolf on earth because isolation has allowed it to live just as it has for thousands of years but ironically its best chance to survive thousands more will be with the help of something uniquely human a bit of luck [Music] you

Channel: Real Wild

Views: 176,595

Rating: 4.7524662 out of 5

Keywords: full documentary, wildlife documentary, wild animal, real wild, animal documentary, animals, wolves, wolf, sea wolf, wolf howling, wolf documentary, new wolf species, wolf species, wolf documentary 2020, wolf documentary black wolf, wolf species in america, wolf species endangered, wolf species around the world, wolf species dog, wolf species in the us, new wolf species found, wolf species of the world, wolf documentary 2021

Id: hau0nJMtvaw

Length: 45min 36sec (2736 seconds)

Published: Thu May 27 2021