If you’ve heard the term “alpha wolf,” you might imagine plucking fangs and fighting to the death for dominance. The idea of a pack of wolves being led by a ruthless dictator is widespread, becoming a sort of shorthand for dominant masculinity.
However, this turned out to be a myth, and in recent years wildlife biologists have largely dropped the term “alpha”. Researchers have found that in the wild, most wolf packs are simply families led by breeding pairs, and bloody duels for supremacy are rare.
“What’s the value of calling a human father an alpha male?” says L. David Mech, a senior researcher at the U.S. Geological Survey who has studied wolf packs in the wild for decades. “He’s the father of his family. That’s exactly the case with wolves.”
family pack
Mecha, like many wildlife biologists, once used terms like alpha and beta to describe the pecking order of wolf packs. But now they are decades outdated, he says. The term arose from research done on captive packs of wolves in the mid-1920s.th But captive herds are very different from wild herds, Mech says. When wolves are kept in captivity, humans typically throw together adult animals that do not share kinship. In these cases, a dominant hierarchy arises, Mech adds, but that’s not how wolves behave when left to their own devices, but the animal equivalent of what might happen in a human prison.
In contrast, wild wolf packs are usually made up of breeding males, breeding females, and their not yet independent offspring from the past two to three years. Probably 6-10. In the late 1980s and into his 1990s, Meck observed the flock annually on Ellesmere Island in northeastern Canada.In 1999 his research Canadian Journal of Zoology, This is one of the first multi-year studies on single packs over time. It was revealed that all members of the pack follow the breeding male, and all other pack members follow the breeding female, regardless of sex or age. The youngest puppies will also obey their older siblings, but if food is scarce, parents feed the younger ones first, much like human parents tend to fragile infants. increase.
The same applies to the gray wolf pack. Conflicts for dominance are basically unheard of in common herds. When the cub is 2-3 years old, she will leave the herd in search of a mate and aim to start her own herd. The Alpha Wolf concept of challenging his father for dominance over an existing pack is not in the Wolf Playbook.
Indeed, even general family conflicts are rare, Mech says. “Let’s say [a] The pair has a one-year-old wolf that has not yet dispersed. “The adults keep the 1-year-olds away from the carcass while the adults feed and eat the puppies,” he says. It’s a place, but it’s a moment.”
Mech used the alpha wolf nomenclature in his classic book on wolf biology. Wolves: ecology and behavior of endangered species, This was published in 1970. But as new research came to light, he made a point of opposing the term.After years of hard work, he finally got wolf It will be out of print in 2022, he says. 2003 book Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation, The one he co-compiled with zoologist Luigi Boitani is now much more accurate and up-to-date, he says.
unusual case
In rare cases, a pack of wolves may swell. This happens in Yellowstone National Park, which has large numbers of moose and multiple large packs of wolves. Young wolves may stay in the birth pack because there is enough food around and it is dangerous to disperse. David Ausband, a wolf researcher and wildlife biologist at the USGS and the University of Idaho, says wolves that are ready to attack on their own risk being attacked by neighboring packs. “When it’s dense, it’s an ordeal,” he says. “It’s like, ‘I’m just staying home. At least I get food.
In such conditions, packs can grow to dozens of strong members. According to the Yellowstone Wolf Tracker, the wolf pack at Yellowstone’s Druid Peak had an unprecedented 37 wolf pack in 2001. You have reached the peak of the wolf. If such an increase occurs within a pack, there could be multiple breeding pairs, and competition for breeding sites could erupt, Ausband says. , I think the alpha terminology applies because there’s still a dominant female calling that herd shot,’ he says. Subordinate males also play a reproductive role in rare situations, but a single dominant male may mate with multiple breeding females.Wolves rarely inbreed unless they belong to an isolated small population. This arrangement is most likely when unrelated females participate, as they do not participate in the pack.)
Ausband, who does genetic research to understand how wolf packs relate and disperse, says having multiple pairs in one pack is now a rarity. says. Before humans hunted and captured gray wolf populations in the northern Rocky Mountains, perhaps 10-15% of the population’s wolf pack had multiple keepers. Since the hunting and capture of these wolves was intermittently legalized in the states surrounding Yellowstone in 2009, Oathband found only one example of such an arrangement in Idaho.
The gray wolf situation is often fluid. In 2008, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service removed the northern Rocky Mountain population from its Endangered Species Act list. The agency relisted the population the same year, but delisted it in 2009, with the exception of the Wyoming wolf, allowing hunting and trapping for the first time in decades. These wolves were revived in 2010 and then delisted again in 2011. Wyoming’s northern Rocky Mountain wolves were subsequently delisted in 2012, relisted in 2014, and delisted again in 2017. As of the February 2022 court order, Mexico, outside the continental United States and the northern Rocky Mountains, is protected from hunting and trapping under the Endangered Species Act.
Hunts and traps may also regroup wolf families depending on which member of the pack is killed. , Meck says it’s usually the young wolves that die. But when a breeding female or male is killed, a lone dispersal wolf may step in instead. states that packs may adopt lone wolves that do not become breeders. This may occur when wolf mortality from hunting and trapping is high, but the evidence is not entirely clear.If a wolf pack loses too many hunting adults, additional You may just need help. “Packs may be more receptive to new individuals for puppies to survive into the next year,” says Bashing. A spare non-breeding adult helps protect the puppies and find food.
Nonetheless, there appears to be a great deal of regional variation in how wolf packs respond to human interference, Bashing says. It’s been decades since researchers studied captive animals and came to erroneous conclusions about wolf dynamics, but how human behavior influences pack performance is still incomplete. “There’s a lot we don’t know about how hunting and tracking mess with herd structure,” says Ausband.
