Wolves and monkeys

As well as hav­ing com­plex re­la­tion­ships with their own spe­cies, wolves also have in­triguing re­la­tion­ships with oth­er wild animals.

Most of these re­la­tion­ships re­volve around prey. Ravens fol­low wolves to scav­enge their kills and it’s be­lieved they also lead wolves to prey so they will have some­thing to scavenge.

Bears, es­pe­cially grizz­lies, chase wolves off a kill so they can chow down on the car­cass. Sometimes, one wolf will taunt the bear while oth­ers dart in to grab a piece of meat.

These ex­changes ap­pear fe­ro­cious but rarely lead to in­jury for the wolves or bears. And of­ten, even though they killed the prey, wolves will just lie down nearby and wait for whatever scraps the bear leaves behind.

But wolves and mon­keys? That re­la­tion­ship was un­heard of un­til a couple of years ago when re­search­ers ob­served Ethiopian wolves hunt­ing for ro­dents — and hav­ing more suc­cess — when they were among a troop of ge­lada mon­keys, a type of baboon.

The wolves wandered through large groups of six to sev­en hun­dred ge­la­das, with the prim­ates show­ing no fear even when the pred­at­ors were very close. And even though the wolves were per­fectly cap­able of killing baby ge­la­das, they rarely did.

The wolves al­ways mingled with the mon­keys dur­ing mid­day when ro­dents in the area were most act­ive. Researchers spec­u­late that the graz­ing mon­keys dis­turb the ro­dents, mak­ing it easi­er for wolves to hunt them, and that the wolves de­lib­er­ately avoid harm­ing the mon­keys to take ad­vant­age of this opportunity.

Photo by Jeffrey Kerby taken in the Guassa Community Reserve, Menz Region of the cent­ral high­lands of Ethiopia.

Red wolf DNA found in Texas canids

Red wolves were de­clared ex­tinct in the wild by 1980. Formerly ran­ging through­out south cent­ral and east­ern por­tions of the US, hunt­ing, trap­ping and loss of hab­it­at decim­ated their numbers.

Luckily, the US Fish and Wildlife Service cap­tured about forty of the wolves and began a cap­tive breed­ing pro­gram. Red wolf fam­il­ies and in­di­vidu­als were re­leased and cap­tive-born pups were suc­cess­fully cross-fostered in wil­der­ness areas of North Carolina from the late 1980s on.

According to Regina Mossotti, dir­ect­or of an­im­al care and con­ser­va­tion at the Endangered Wolf Center in Missouri, in early 2018 there were ap­prox­im­ately 230 red wolves in cap­tive breed­ing pro­grams but pop­u­la­tions in the wild had dropped from over 100 to around thirty.

Coyotes are found in many urb­an and rur­al areas of North America. Photo cour­tesy US National Park Service

But a few years ago, bio­lo­gist Ron Wooten no­ticed some­thing odd about the coyotes he was pho­to­graph­ing on Galveston Island in Texas. When he found two of the an­im­als dead on the road­side, he took some samples hop­ing ge­net­ic test­ing would provide some answers.

Researchers at Princeton University were shocked to find a piece of en­dangered red wolf gen­ome in the tis­sue they ana­lysed. The ge­net­ic evid­ence in­dic­ates that at least some of the Galveston Island ‘coyotes’ ap­pear to be red wolf/​coyote hybrids.

Red wolves (and east­ern wolves, which primar­ily in­hab­ited south­east­ern Canada and the north­east­ern US and are now only found in south­ern Ontario and Quebec) will in­ter­breed with coyotes when their pop­u­la­tions fall be­low a sus­tain­able level.

Still, re­search­ers were sur­prised to find red wolf DNA on an is­land in Texas. And the Galveston Island can­ids are unique in that they pos­sess some red wolf genes not found in the cap­tive population.

Challenges to re­in­tro­du­cing red wolves to wil­der­ness areas con­tin­ue and they may once again be de­clared ex­tinct in the wild.

The Endangered Species Act does not in­clude pro­tec­ted status for hy­brids but some sci­ent­ists feel this think­ing is out­dated, es­pe­cially since hy­brid­isa­tion does not seem to be as rare as pre­vi­ously thought.

But even if the Galveston Island can­ids do not re­ceive pro­tec­ted status, their pres­ence is a test­a­ment to the re­si­li­ency of wolves and opens the door to fur­ther dis­cus­sions on the status of hybrids.

Top im­age: Red wolves are lean an­im­als with a dis­tinct red­dish cast to their coats. They’re in between the size of a grey wolf and coyote. Photo cour­tesy B. Bartel, USFWS

What wolves eat

As car­ni­vores, wolves will eat any­thing from a mouse to a moose in­clud­ing grasshop­pers, birds and frogs.  Although wild wolves will oc­ca­sion­ally eat ber­ries, their bod­ies re­quire meat to survive.

As Jack London wrote in White Fang, a story about a wolf-dog hy­brid, “The aim of life was meat. Life it­self was meat.”

Most wolves ob­tain their meat from un­gu­lates such as deer, elk, moose, bison and muskox­en. While it’s dan­ger­ous hunt­ing large an­im­als with horns and hooves, the huge food re­ward is worth the ef­fort and risk of in­jury or even death. On the oth­er hand, it takes a lot of mice to fill a wolf’s belly and the en­ergy ex­pen­ded is of­ten great­er than the cal­or­ies gained.

While most wolves de­pend on un­gu­lates for their susten­ance, some eat a lot of fish. This has been re­cor­ded through­out the world and of­ten in­volves fish trav­el­ling up­stream to spawn.

This wolf caught 15 sock­eye sal­mon in one hour in Brooks River, Alaska. Photo cour­tesy Paul Stinsa

But some wolves rely heav­ily on fish and mar­ine-re­lated an­im­als year-round. In fact, wolves on some British Columbia coastal is­lands primar­ily eat sal­mon, seals and shell­fish, as well as mink and Canada goose eggs. They will even move rocks at low tide to eat tiny mol­luscs called chitons. Wolves on out­er is­lands may sel­dom – if ever – see a deer.

 

Wolves aren’t picky about their food. They may cache some meat and dig it up for din­ner later, as well as scav­enge prey that has died of nat­ur­al causes or been killed by oth­er animals.

They can eas­ily be­come used to the easy pick­ings found at un­se­cured hu­man garbage dumps and will raid camp­sites or break into tents and kayak holds to check out hu­man food. Although they prob­ably won’t eat much of the food they find this way, they will bite into whatever they can ac­cess to check it out.

At times, wolves also kill and eat live­stock and pets, which is the ma­jor source of their con­flict with humans.

Top photo was taken on Ellesmere Island in the high arc­tic where wolves prey on hares and muskox­en. Photo cour­tesy Dave Mech

 

Wolf scat and butterflies

Wolves have cast-iron di­gest­ive sys­tems cap­able of hand­ling frag­ments of bone and shell, an­im­al fur and even the in­tact nails from a seal.

These in­tact seal nails were found in the dried up scat of a BC coastal wolf. Photo by Paula Wild

When it comes to food, wolves are op­por­tun­ist­ic. They’ll eat ber­ries and have been known to nibble on hu­man food and garbage. String and rem­nants of clothes have also been found in the scat of camp robbers.

Wolf scat looks sim­il­ar to a piece of cord and usu­ally tapers to a point on the end. An adult wolf’s scat is usu­ally between 25 to 38 mil­li­metres (one to 1.5 inches) in dia­met­er. If it’s runny, the wolf may have re­cently eaten some bloody meat.

Una Ledrew and Dave Ratcliffe were startled when they ob­served chunks of rope in wolf scat near their home. “They were chew­ing on and swal­low­ing ropes of all kinds, plastic rope, big thick rope we use to tie up the skiff,” Ledrew said.

Like the seal nails above, big chunks of rope seemed to pass through a wolf’s di­gest­ive tract nearly in­tact. Photo by Una Ledrew

My guess is the wolves were after the salt left be­hind by hu­man hands but some of the rope had been out in the open for ages. Wolf ex­perts I spoke to were baffled as to why wolves would con­sume rope.

Wolf scat is more than just part of a wolf’s elim­in­a­tion pro­cess; it’s also an im­port­ant part of lupine com­mu­nic­a­tion. Scat is one way wolves’ mark their ter­rit­ory and is of­ten found in con­spicu­ous loc­a­tions such as trail intersections.

These visu­al and ol­fact­ory mark­ers serve as a sig­nal to warn oth­er wolf packs out of their ter­rit­ory or to let fam­ily mem­bers know they’ve passed that way. Wolf scat is also part of nature’s re­cyc­ling pro­gram, en­rich­ing the soil wherever it’s deposited.

But the biggest sur­prise about wolf scat is but­ter­flies. They aren’t in it, they’re on it. Apparently, but­ter­flies love wolf scat due to the high con­cen­tra­tion of nu­tri­ents.  In fact, nu­mer­ous re­search­ers told me, “If you’re look­ing for wolves, look for butterflies.”

Gerard Gorman (www​.probirder​.com) is an au­thor and bird­ing and wild­life con­sult­ant and guide spe­cial­ising in cent­ral and Eastern Europe. He took this photo in Aggtelek National Park in Hungary.