WOLVES

science-junkie:

Why everything you know about wolf packs is wrong
By Lauren Davis

The alpha wolf is a figure that looms large in our imagination. The notion of a supreme pack leader who fought his way to dominance and reigns superior to the other wolves in his pack informs both our fiction and is how many people understand wolf behavior. But the alpha wolf doesn’t exist—at least not in the wild…

Although the notions of “alpha wolf” and “alpha dog” seem thoroughly ingrained in our language, the idea of the alpha comes from Rudolph Schenkel, an animal behaviorist who, in 1947, published the then-groundbreaking paper “Expressions Studies on Wolves.” During the 1930s and 1940s, Schenkel studied captive wolves in Switzerland’s Zoo Basel, attempting to identify a “sociology of the wolf.”

In his research, Schenkel identified two primary wolves in a pack: a male “lead wolf” and a female “bitch.” He described them as “first in the pack group.” He also noted “violent rivalries” between individual members of the packs… Thus, the alpha wolf was born. Throughout his paper, Schenkel also draws frequent parallels between wolves and domestic dogs, often following his conclusions with anecdotes about our household canines. The implication is clear: wolves live in packs in which individual members vie for dominance and dogs, their domestic brethren, must be very similar indeed.

A key problem with Schenkel’s wolf studies is that, while they represented the first close study of wolves, they didn’t involve any study of wolves in the wild… In more recent years, animal behaviorists, including [wildlife biologist L. David] Mech, have spent more and more time studying wolves in the wild, and the behaviors they have observed has been different from those observed by Schenkel and other watchers of zoo-bound wolves. In 1999, Mech’s paper “Alpha Status, Dominance, and Division of Labor in Wolf Packs” was published in the Canadian Journal of Zoology. The paper is considered by many to be a turning point in understanding the structure of wolf packs…

Mech’s studies of wild wolves have found that wolves live in families: two parents along with their younger cubs. Wolves do not have an innate sense of rank; they are not born leaders or born followers. The “alphas” are simply what we would call in any other social group “parents.” The offspring follow the parents as naturally as they would in any other species. No one has “won” a role as leader of the pack; the parents may assert dominance over the offspring by virtue of being the parents. While the captive wolf studies saw unrelated adults living together in captivity, related, rather than unrelated, wolves travel together in the wild. Younger wolves do not overthrow the “alpha” to become the leader of the pack; as wolf pups grow older, they are dispersed from their parents’ packs, pair off with other dispersed wolves, have pups, and thus form packs of their owns.

This doesn’t mean that wolves don’t display social dominance, however… Wolves (and other animals, including humans), display social dominance, it just isn’t always easy to boil dominant behavior down to simple explanations. Dominant behavior and dominance relationships can be highly situational, and can vary greatly from individual to individual even within the same species. It’s not the entire concept of wolves displaying social dominance that was dispelled, just the simple hierarchical pack structure…

Source: io9.com

Images credit: Caninest - Michael Cummings

In addition to this, I feel like I should mention that the described above is how it úsually goes in the wild, but there are a lot of remarkable exceptions. 

Besides that, wolf packs in the wild can exist out of more then parents and their offspring. Often ‘uncles’ and ‘aunts’ join the pack and yearlings often stay in the pack too, even thought the parents already have new cubs.

You can read Mech’s ‘Alpha status, dominance and division of labor in wolf packs’ online here. 

(via electricrain)

canidcompendium:

Coddled male wolf cubs father fewer pups

In a wolf pack, lots of sibling babysitters can lead to plump, healthy cubs. But too much pampering makes male wolves less successful in later life.

To understand the effects of sibling helpers on wolf cubs throughout their lives, Amanda Sparkman from Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada, and colleagues studied reintroduced red wolves roaming North Carolina by trapping them to record their size and body weight and monitoring their life histories.

The researchers studied the wolves when the reintroduced population was just starting out and few in number, and again when the wolves had spread throughout the area and were to be found at higher densities.

When wolves were scarce and prey abounded, pups with “helpers” – older siblings still in the family unit – fared better than those without: they were heavier and larger than their helper-less counterparts. At high densities, however, this dynamic flipped for female cubs. With less raccoon to go around, girls living in big families ended up smaller and lighter. High densities had no effect on their brothers, suggesting that male pups aggressively outcompete their sisters for whatever food comes in.

The real surprise, however, came in the long-term effects of helpers on cubs. Researchers expected male cubs that had benefited from helpers to turn into reproductively successful adults. In fact, they found the opposite: male wolves that had grown up with helpers actually had fewer offspring over their lifetimes than males that had endured a helper-less cubhood.

Sparkman thinks that males who did better food-wise early in life might pay a metabolic price for maintaining their bulky frames. “We assume that if you have helpers and you are bigger, that helps you over all,” said Sparkman. “But there might be some cost to being big that makes you age more quickly.”

Meanwhile, the rangy females who’d been forced to vie with older siblings for dinner scraps ended up with higher lifetime reproductive success than those who hadn’t. The researchers speculate that girl cubs that survive the crucible of the sibling scrabble may be “individuals of the highest quality”, capable of eclipsing other wolves.

(via NewScientist)

Photo by Another Seb

son-pereda:

via Deux louveteaux sont nés au Zoo de la Garenne - Zoonaute

Deux louveteaux, une femelle et un mâle, sont nés à la Garenne le samedi 6 avril 2013. 

Howling seems to serve at least three functions: (1) letting packmates know where each one is, thereby facilitating assembly; (2) advertising the pack territory and warning against intrusion; and (3) motivating packmates to join in on a hunt.

Photograph: Arctic wolf (Canis lupus arctos) by L. David Mech.

Red wolf VS Coyote

NABU (German federation of nature protection) declares april 30th as ‘Wolf Day’ to stop prejudices about wolves

After 150 years, the wolves are returning to Germany. A lot of people welcome them, but others are skeptical and unsure. Reason enough for NABU to declare april the 30th as Wolf Day (‘Tag des Wolfes’) and dispel the myths about the “big bad wolf”.

NABU asked the chairman of parliamentary groups represented in Sachsen not to give in to the demands for regulation of wolf hunting and continue the protection of the wolf. 

Support our request and send an e-mail to the Sachsen group leaders.

Picture by S. Korner
More information here 

When wolves kill an animal that is larger than they can eat at once, they often sleep close to it and eat again when they wake up. This wolf is sleeping on the leftovers from a white-tailed deer.

Picture by Carl R. Sams, scanned from the book ‘Wolves’ by Leonard lee Rue III

did-you-kno:

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(via hitchhikerwithoutguide)