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Life Sciences Commons

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Ecology and Evolutionary Biology

Northern Michigan University

Series

2017

Articles 1 - 1 of 1

Full-Text Articles in Life Sciences

Estimating Biomass Of Berries Consumed By Gray Wolves, Thomas Gable, Steve K. Windels, John G. Bruggink Feb 2017

Estimating Biomass Of Berries Consumed By Gray Wolves, Thomas Gable, Steve K. Windels, John G. Bruggink

Journal Articles

Gray wolves (Canis lupus) consume berries and other wild fruits seasonally when available or abundant. However, a method to convert percent frequency of occurrence or percent volume of berries in wolf scats to percent biomass has not yet been developed. We used estimates of the average number of blueberry (Vaccinium spp.) seeds in 10 individual wolf scats collected in and adjacent to Voyageurs National Park, Minnesota, USA, along with published values of the number of seeds per blueberry and blueberry masses to estimate that a wolf scat containing only berries equated to an average of 0.468 kg …