@Ettina. I was off by a decade, the article was 1994, not 2004 and I can't get access because I'm no longer in college, thus no account with the journal, lol. That being said, here's the link to the article that makes the claim in case you have access: Link. Since I cannot quote and thus verify the statistic I will withdraw it, but not the underlying premise.
To support the underlying premise here's some other links that highlight the misinformation about wolf packs that keep getting regurgitated in popular media:
Video
The guy here was attacked by a wolf he was rearing. That's kind of unimportant, but the video he has highlights the point-- a single wolf takes down a much larger prey animal without the need of the pack.
Isle Royale
Isle Royal is an island off of Lake Superior, it's as remote as one can get and the ecosystem there features a predator/prey relationship between wolves and moose, with no other species cluttering the data. It's as close as one can get to studying wildlife in "lab" type conditions. (Yellowstone gets a lot of wolf attention due to the government reintroducing grey wolves there about 2 decades ago, but it's actually quite poor to use for study of wolf behavior because the majority of wolves there have been tainted by captivity and the environment is new to them).
A quote from the article:
Quote:
It was long thought that wolves live in packs so they could kill their prey, like moose, which are much larger than wolves. But, Isle Royale wolves showed us that even a lone wolf can kill a moose. Later, it was thought that larger packs were more efficient at killing large prey. This also turned out to be not quite right. Decades of observations on Isle Royale wolves showed, quite surprisingly, that as pack size grows larger, each wolf in the pack gets less food. Although they kill moose a bit more frequently, larger packs have more mouths to feed.
If you need social approval from the hierarchy, here's L. David Mech, considered one of the top wolf experts in the world.
Outmoded notion of the alpha wolfNo need to read, in the short video at the bottom Mech himself describes it, and how he was a part of misrepresenting "alpha" in culture. Obviously he could use some work on body posture, but that's beside the point, lol.
Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and ConservationAnd some quotes from the book for good measure (only have access to two chapters online, but the entire book is really good), bold emphasis mine:
Page 10
Quote:
As indicated above, most wolves disperse from their natural packs. Unless it assumes a breeding position within the pack, which is rare, any wolf born into a pack will leave it.
Page 7
Quote:
If large numbers of wolves were necessary to prey on large ungulates, it would be difficult for lone wolves and pairs to survive and produce the offspring that enlarge the pack. In fact, large numbers of wolves are not necessary to kill large prey. Single wolves have been recorded to kill even the largest of the wolf's major prey species, including adult moose (Cowan 1947; A. Bjärvall and E. Isakson, personal communication; Thurber and Peterson 1993, Mech et al. 1998), muskox (Gray 1970), and bison (D. Dragon, cited in Carbyn et al. 1993).
Page 9
Quote:
It certainly seems reasonable that, at least to some extent, hunting in groups would increase hunting efficiency even if no cooperative strategy were used. Multiple hunters, even if inept or inexperienced, would seem to yield greater sensing, chasing, restricting, attacking, and killing power than single hunters.
However, possibly offsetting this advantage is the fact that multiple hunters must also share the proceeds (Brown 1982). This and numerous other theoretical and empirical considerations have led some workers to the conclusion that "cooperative hunting is more often a consequence of gregariousness than its evolutionary cause" (Packer and Ruttan, 1988, 189).
A good test of the hypothesis that larger groups of wolves are more efficient at hunting or killing prey is to determine amount of food obtained per wolf for packs of various sizes. On Isle Royale during 1959-1961, the pack of about fifteen wolves mentioned above preyed on moose, but in 1961, when the pack split into two about half the time, the amount of food obtained was greater than during the previous 2 years, when the pack hunted as a unit (Mech 1966b). Similarly, lone wolves in Minnesota killed more prey per wolf than a pack of five (Mech and Frenzel 1971a), and pairs killed more prey per wolf than packs (Fritts and Mech 1981; Ballard et al. 1987, 1997; Thurber and Peterson 1993; Hayes et al. 2000).
When this hypothesis was tested more rigorously with wolves and moose on Isle Royale, the result was the same: the larger the pack, the less food obtained per wolf (fig 1.1). Synthesizing data from many studies including most wolf prey gave the same result (Schmidt and Mech 1997).
edit: grammar, probably a lot more too, but I gotta get back to work.
22 Apr 2016, 3:55 am
