Algonquin Park

Before Europeans colonized North America, a uniquely American wolf roamed the eastern forests of southern Canada to Florida and west to the Great Plains. Known today as "red wolf" (Canis rufus) in the south and "eastern wolf" (Canis lycaon) in the north, evidence suggests that these indigenous forest wolves shared a common evolutionary history until only a few centuries ago when they were extirpated from the intervening majority of their historical range (Fig. 1A; Sacks et al., 2021). While the eastern wolf persists today primarily as a small population in Algonquin Provincial Park, Canada, the red wolf was ostensibly driven from its last stronghold in gulf-coastal Louisiana and Texas by 1980 (Nowak, 2002)...

Particular types of nature-based tourism programs, including multi-day children's overnight/residential summer camp canoe tripping programs in North America, often (re)produce (neo)colonial constructions of nature and the "wilderness." The purpose of this paper is to expose how wilderness is constructed and circulated in the context of a particular summer camp's canoe trips in Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada. Within this paper, we identify how specific legacies of colonialism are maintained and redeployed through the practices and representations of summer camp canoe trippers...

Individuals undergo profound changes throughout their early life as they grow and transition between life-history stages. As a result, the conditions that individuals experience during development can have both immediate and lasting effects on their physiology, behavior, and, ultimately, fitness. In a population of Canada jays in Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada, we characterized the diet composition and physiological profile of young jays at three key time points during development (nestling, pre-fledge, and pre-dispersal) by quantifying stable-carbon (δ13C) and -nitrogen (δ15N) isotopes and corticosterone concentrations in feathers...

Understanding how events throughout the annual cycle are linked is important for predicting variation in individual fitness, but whether and how carry-over effects scale up to influence population dynamics is poorly understood. Using 38 years of demographic data from Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, and a full annual cycle integrated population model, we examined the influence of environmental conditions and density on the population growth rate of Canada jays (Perisoreus canadensis), a resident boreal passerine that relies on perishable cached food for over-winter survival and late-winter breeding...

Post-glacial colonization of lakes in Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada resulted in food webs with cisco ( Coregonus artedi sensu lato) and either Mysis diluviana or Chaoborus spp. as the dominant diel migrator. Mysis as prey, its diel movements and benthic occupancy, are hypothesized to be key elements of ecological opportunity for cisco diversity in the Laurentian Great Lakes. If correct, the hypothesis strongly implies that lakes with Mysis would have greater trophic niche size and drive greater adaptive radiation of cisco forms relative to lakes without Mysis ...

Although density regulates the abundance of most wild animal populations by influencing vital rates, such as fecundity and survival, the mechanisms responsible for generating negative density dependence are unclear for many species. Site dependence occurs when there is preferential filling of high-quality territories, which results in higher per capita vital rates at low densities because a larger proportion of occupied territories are of high quality. Using 41 yr of territory occupancy and demographic data, we investigated whether site dependence was a mechanism acting to influence fecundity and, by extension, regulate a population of Canada Jays in Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada...

The blacklegged tick, Ixodes scapularis, is established in several regions of Ontario, Canada, and continues to spread into new geographic areas across the province at a rapid rate. This poses a significant public health risk since I. scapularis transmits the Lyme disease-causing bacterium, Borrelia burgdorferi, and other pathogens of potential public health concern. The objective of this study was to develop species distribution models for I. scapularis and B. burgdorferi to predict and compare the potential distributions of the tick vector and the Lyme disease pathogen as well as the ecological factors most important for species establishment...

Food availability early in life can play a vital role in an individual's development and success, but experimental evidence for the direct effects of food on body condition, physiology, and survival of young animals in the wild is still relatively scarce. Food-caching Canada Jays (Perisoreus canadensis) begin breeding in the late winter and, therefore, rely on either cached food or seemingly limited quantities of fresh food to feed nestlings in the early spring. Using a 2-yr food supplementation experiment conducted during the nestling period and 40 yr of observational data on food supplemented by the public, we examined whether food quantity during early life influenced the physiology, body condition, timing of fledging, and survival of young Canada Jays in Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, Canada...

The diversity of Laurentian Great Lakes ciscoes ( Coregonus artedi , sensu lato) arose via repeated local adaptive divergence including deepwater ciscoes that are now extirpated or threatened. The nigripinnis form, or Blackfin Cisco, is extirpated from the Great Lakes and remains only in Lake Nipigon. Putative nigripinnis populations were recently discovered in sympatry with artedi in a historical drainage system of glacial Lake Algonquin, the precursor of lakes Michigan and Huron. Given the apparent convergence on Great Lakes form, we labeled this form blackfin...

Evidence suggests that range-edge populations are highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, but few studies have examined the specific mechanisms that are driving observed declines. Species that store perishable food for extended periods of time may be particularly susceptible to environmental change because shifts in climatic conditions could accelerate the natural degradation of their cached food. Here, we use 40 years of breeding data from a marked population of Canada jays ( Perisoreus canadensis ) located at the southern edge of their range in Algonquin Provincial Park, Ontario, to examine whether climatic conditions prior to breeding carry over to influence reproductive performance...

For many oviparous animals, incubation temperature influences sex through temperature-dependent sex determination (TSD). Although climate change may skew sex ratios in species with TSD, few available methods predict sex under natural conditions, fewer still are based on mechanistic hypotheses of development, and field tests of existing methods are rare. We propose a new approach that calculates the probability of masculinization (PM) in natural nests. This approach subsumes the mechanistic hypotheses describing the outcome of TSD, by integrating embryonic development with the temperature-dependent reaction norm for sex determination...

Detecting all species in a given survey is challenging, regardless of sampling effort. This issue, more commonly known as imperfect detection, can have negative impacts on data quality and interpretation, most notably leading to false absences for rare or difficult-to-detect species. It is important that this issue be addressed, as estimates of species richness are critical to many areas of ecological research and management. In this study, we set out to determine the impacts of imperfect detection, and decisions about thresholds for inclusion in occupancy, on estimates of species richness and community structure...

Arthropods are the most diverse taxonomic group of terrestrial eukaryotes and are sensitive to physical alterations in their environment such as those caused by forestry. With their enormous diversity and physical omnipresence, arthropods could be powerful indicators of the effects of disturbance following forestry. When arthropods have been used to measure the effects of disturbance, the total diversity of some groups is often found to increase following forestry. However, these findings are frequently derived using a coarse taxonomic grain (family or order) to accommodate for various taxonomic impediments (including cryptic diversity and poorly resourced taxonomists)...

Timing of reproduction can influence individual fitness whereby early breeders tend to have higher reproductive success than late breeders. However, the fitness consequences of timing of breeding may also be influenced by environmental conditions after the commencement of breeding. We tested whether ambient temperatures during the incubation and early nestling periods modulated the effect of laying date on brood size and dominant juvenile survival in gray jays ( Perisoreus canadensis ), a sedentary boreal species whose late winter nesting depends, in part, on caches of perishable food...

Several species of birds and mammals overcome periods of scarcity by caching food, but for the vast majority of species, it is virtually unknown whether they are food limited during these periods. The Gray Jay (Perisoreus canadensis) is a boreal-resident, food-caching passerine that breeds in late winter when fresh food is scarce. Using a two-year experiment and 43 years of monitoring data, we examined the food limitation hypothesis in a population of Gray Jays in Algonquin Park, Ontario, Canada, that has declined by over 50% in the last three decades...

Many temperate animals spend half their lives in a non-active, overwintering state, and multiple adaptations have evolved to enable winter survival. One notable vertebrate model is Chrysemys picta, whose hatchlings display dichotomous overwintering strategies: some hatchlings spend their first winter aquatically after nest emergence in the autumn, whereas others overwinter terrestrially within their natal nest with subsequent emergence in the spring. The occurrence of these strategies varies among populations and temporally within populations; however, factors that determine the strategy employed by a nest in nature are unknown...

It is widely recognized that protected areas can strongly influence ecological systems and that hybridization is an important conservation issue. However, previous studies have not explicitly considered the influence of protected areas on hybridization dynamics. Eastern wolves are a species of special concern and their distribution is largely restricted to a protected population in Algonquin Provincial Park (APP), Ontario, Canada, where they are the numerically dominant canid. We studied intrinsic and extrinsic factors influencing survival and cause-specific mortality of hybrid and parental canids in the three-species hybrid zone between eastern wolves, eastern coyotes, and gray wolves in and adjacent to APP...

Gray wolves (Canis lupus) and coyotes (Canis latrans) generally exhibit intraspecific territoriality manifesting in spatial segregation between adjacent packs. However, previous studies have found a high degree of interspecific spatial overlap between sympatric wolves and coyotes. Eastern wolves (Canis lycaon) are the most common wolf in and around Algonquin Provincial Park (APP), Ontario, Canada and hybridize with sympatric gray wolves and coyotes. We hypothesized that all Canis types (wolves, coyotes, and hybrids) exhibit a high degree of spatial segregation due to greater genetic, morphologic, and ecological similarities between wolves and coyotes in this hybrid system compared with western North American ecosystems...

A diplomonad flagellate found in the blood of frogs in Algonquin Park, Ontario is described by light and electron microscopy. Based on comparisons to earlier ultrastructural descriptions of various diplomonads, this flagellate warrants separate generic status and is consequently named Brugerolleia algonquinensis gen. nov., sp. nov. This organism measures 8.4 × 3.2 μm with the following features: paired reniform nuclei with kinetids arranged in binary axial symmetry; 3 pairs of flagella emerging from the anteriad and a pair of posteriorly directed recurrent flagella which emerge through fibrillar funnel-like structures; dimpled terminus; direct fibres posterior to the nuclei that recurve near the posterior end of the organism; concentric layers of endoplasmic reticulum; absence of mitochondria, Golgi bodies and caudal spike...

Eastern wolves have hybridized extensively with coyotes and gray wolves and are listed as a 'species of special concern' in Canada. However, a distinct population of eastern wolves has been identified in Algonquin Provincial Park (APP) in Ontario. Previous studies of the diverse Canis hybrid zone adjacent to APP have not linked genetic analysis with field data to investigate genotype-specific morphology or determine how resident animals of different ancestry are distributed across the landscape in relation to heterogeneous environmental conditions...