“I was just blown away,” Griffin told Phys.org. “I have never seen anything like that before … I just got lucky.”
She reached out to ADFG and got connected with researchers from OSU who were already studying gray wolf hunting and predation habits in coastal Alaska. Later in 2016, the group of researchers watched and filmed a wolf hunting down a harbor seal near the mouth of a creek. The wolf jumped into the water of Hallow Bay and grabbing the harbor seal’s tail, thrashing it around. It proceeded to feed on the harbor seal for a half hour after exhausting it in a fight.
For this team of researchers, there was nothing new about wolves eating sea otters. They published a different study in January 2023 that documented how the canines relied on sea otters for most of their diets after eviscerating the Sitka blacktail deer population on Pleasant Island in the Alexander Archipelago. Sea otter remnants first popped up in wolf scat analysis in 2015.
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“This is really exciting documentation of behaviors we believe have never been directly observed by scientists,” OSU doctoral student Ellen Dymit said. “It kind of forces us to reconsider the assumptions that underlie a lot of our management decisions and modeling around wolf populations and populations of their prey, which often assume that wolves depend on ungulates, like moose and elk.”
Wolves across North America are notoriously generalist eaters, Yellowstone Wolf Project technician Taylor Rabe told Outdoor Life in August 2023. Whatever is on the landscape is fair game, whether they hunt down a living animal or sniff out a dead carcass. In coastal Alaska, they do both.
“Wolves are opportunistic,” Rabe said. “They will take something if the opportunity presents itself.”