The Wolf - L. David Mech

The Wolf is a fairly comprehensive - for its time - look at most aspects of the lives and biology of wolves. I say, 'for its time', because the book was originally published in 1970, and this revised edition was from 1980. So there's no research referenced in here more recent than the late '60s. There's still a lot of information in the book, but it may be a bit dated.

Also, the descriptions of some of the studies are a reminder the rules for treatment of animals in research studies was a lot more lax back in the day. Mech describes on study that tried to determine how much food wolves could consume at one time, since they're often observed gorging when they bring down prey. So the researcher withheld food from his five captive wolves for two days, then gave them all the food they could eat. Then killed, sorry, "sacrificed" them so he could weigh their stomachs.

Most of the biology research I've been a part of over the years, we were trying our best to not get any animals killed. Although those were more general population surveys and nest success studies, so the end goal was somewhat different, and there wasn't the need to be as invasive to gather information*.

The book is broken down into chapter covering general topics, which are broken down into more specific areas. Chapter 3 is about social order and communication, which includes dynamics within a pack and also between other packs. The chapters will overlap, such as how Chapter 7 discusses hunting habits. Since the wolves are pack hunters, research discussed in Chapter 3 is referenced here as well.

The dated aspect of the research does make me question how accurate some of it still is. Some of the work done on pack dynamics was with wolves in captivity, and I've seen papers elsewhere that discuss how those packs were sometimes composed of wolves taken from several different packs and put together, so they aren't representative of true relationships within a pack. But a lot of the information is from studies done in the wild through observation, so presumably that would be more accurate.

Mech does address places where different researchers came to different conclusions, or places where he believes an author is drawing from unconfirmed resources, like old trapper or hunter stories. Mech's own research, on both Isle Royale and the work he'd only recently begun in Minnesota at the time this book was published, factors in quite a bit. As you might guess, he doesn't think he's drawing off questionable sources, but he does acknowledge where the information is too circumstantial to do more than raise possible answers, or where they might need more time to see how a predator-prey dynamic plays out over time.

I was most interested in the chapter on hunting success and tactics, and the point that there's a level of disparity between predator and prey where the predator can't act as the primary limiting factor on the prey species any more. Basically, there are too many of the prey for the predators to kill enough of them to offset all the new ones born every year. I'd read a similar study done in Australia looking at whether the foxes that were introduced by the British could control the population of rabbits (also introduced by the British). The conclusion was yes, up to a point, but once the rabbits hit a certain density, the foxes just can't eat enough of them to do the job. It's the same with wolves (and most other primary predators I'd imagine). The predator becomes just one of several factors - disease, available food, weather, etc. - that limits the population in some extent.

'Burkholder listed the shoulder, neck, sides, and flanks as the points of attack on caribou. It is significant that the Alaskan wolf pack that attacked caribou in this way attacked moose in the rump, just as wolves do in other areas. In other words, at least with caribou and moose, the point of attack seems to depend primarily on the type of prey rather than on the behavior of individual wolf packs.'

* My ornithology professor told us once about a study done - many decades before his time - to determine the strength of the crop and gizzard (the parts of their digestive system they use to rush the food they swallow, since they have no teeth) of turkeys. First they fed the turkeys walnuts, which the turkeys successfully broke down. Then, he said, they tried razor blades, which the turkeys again somehow broke down, although I imagine their internal organs were a disaster afterward, and they almost certainly died.