The 2025-26 Isle Royale wolf-moose survey, released this week, reports that the wolf population on the remote Lake Superior island is thriving and successfully preying on moose — a turnaround from the near-extinction the project documented in the early 2010s [1]. The Associated Press cites the Michigan Technological University researchers who run the longest continuous predator-prey study in the world, now in its 67th year [1].

The packs are stable, breeding, and dispersed across the island in the configuration researchers said the system needed [1]. Moose numbers, which had ballooned during the wolf collapse and stripped large patches of balsam fir, are now in measurable decline as predation resumes [1]. The vegetation will take longer to register the change.

The intervention that did the work was the National Park Service's 2018-19 wolf reintroduction, when 19 animals were brought from Minnesota, Michigan, and Ontario to replace the inbred two-wolf remnant [1]. The genetic rescue worked. The population has since reproduced on its own.

The survey lands in a week when federal environmental policy is mostly subtraction — Boundary Waters mining permits, offshore wind shutdowns, Forest Service lab closures. Isle Royale is the counter-example: a small, expensive, scientifically argued reintroduction that worked, and that nobody is currently trying to undo.

-- DARA OSEI, London