Wolverine denning in persistent spring snowpack is essential for cub rearing — climate change threatens this critical welfare requirement.
Wolverine denning welfare illustrates how climate change is creating welfare harms through habitat loss at a scale and rate that exceeds evolutionary adaptation. Female wolverines who cannot find appropriate snowpack for denning either fail to reproduce or produce cubs who die from exposure when snowpack disappears prematurely. Each failed reproductive attempt is a welfare loss — not just for the cubs who die, but for the female whose reproductive investment is wasted and who must survive another year at high metabolic cost. The warming climate is eroding the physical infrastructure that wolverine reproductive welfare depends on — a harm that accumulates silently in denning failure statistics.