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Wolves entered the national limelight this week when Rep. Other times, he and his partners will stumble across the juicy meat of the job-a wolf howling atop a boulder, a pack devouring a weakened elk-and the biting, windy wait will all be worth it. Sometimes he’ll go a day without spotting a wolf, just sitting in sub-freezing snow fields and staring through a scope. Brendan’s work as a volunteer is to follow the wolf packs (from a safe distance) and record their behavioral, social, and predation habits. The wolves are tagged with radio collars as part of the Yellowstone Wolf Project, which has been observing the animals in their natural environments in an effort to help protect them since 1995. Wolves that eat small prey are less vulnerable to scavengers, and are typically much less social.Every few months, my friend Brendan disappears into the wilderness to track wolves. However, that loss is more than compensated by consuming food before ravens get it. The primary cost of group living is sharing food with pack mates. This is why mothers invoke the wolf when asking their children to eat more slowly.
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In just a couple of hours a large wolf can consume as much as nine kilograms (twenty pounds) of meat. Wolves have two adaptations for fast eating.įirst, wolves can consume a tremendous amount of food at one feeding. The faster a carcass is consumed, the less that is given to ravens. Some species, like cougars, lions, and cheetahs hide the carcasses of their prey or cache them out of reach from scavengers. When you catch something big, you must be prepared to deal with scavengers. The green line represents what each wolf get to eat (net energy gain, actually) when losses to ravens are taken into account. The red line is what wolves kill on a per wolf basis. Larger packs, despite the cost of sharing with more pack mates, might do better than smaller packs by minimizing losses to scavenging ravens.Īssessing this idea, would require accounting for how all the costs and benefits of foraging change with pack size. Perhaps wolves live in groups to reduce losses to scavenging ravens. Ultimately, ravens can scavenge as much as a third of what wolves kill. Each raven can eat or cache about two pounds of food per day. Typically, between 5 and 20 ravens attend a kill site.
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We began to wonder, could ravens help us understand why wolves live in packs? Wolves are almost always followed by ravens - waiting to scavenge from the next kill. Although they kill moose a bit more frequently, larger packs have more mouths to feed. Decades of observations on Isle Royale wolves showed, quite surprisingly, that as pack size grows larger, each wolf in the pack gets less food. This also turned out to be not quite right. Later, it was thought that larger packs were more efficient at killing large prey. But, Isle Royale wolves showed us that even a lone wolf can kill a moose. It was long thought that wolves live in packs so they could kill their prey, like moose, which are much larger than wolves. They live in groups, called packs, comprised typically of 4 to 12 wolves. Predators are the very symbols of solitariness. Think about Kipling’s Sher Khan and expressions like lone wolves. Why do wolves live in packs? Most predators are like tigers, leopards, and weasels - they live solitary lives.