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Terrestrial Wild Animals
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Carnivorous and Omnivores Animals, Excluding Felids
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Canids (Canidae) & Hyaenids (Hyaenidae)
Wolf (Canis lupus)
Wolf (Canis lupus)
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Wolf (Canis lupus)
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 (03-10-2018, 12:55 AM)GrizzlyClaws Wrote:(03-10-2018, 12:21 AM)Wolverine Wrote: @GrizzlyClaws do you have any data for average weight of the wolves in Wood Buffalo NP (Alberta)? According to David Attenborough they are the largest wolves in the world and that's logical because they are specialised on hunting of bisons. I am not able to find any detailed data about these wolves. What Canadian province are you from?  (03-10-2018, 02:23 AM)Wolverine Wrote:(03-10-2018, 12:55 AM)GrizzlyClaws Wrote:(03-10-2018, 12:21 AM)Wolverine Wrote: @GrizzlyClaws do you have any data for average weight of the wolves in Wood Buffalo NP (Alberta)? According to David Attenborough they are the largest wolves in the world and that's logical because they are specialised on hunting of bisons. I am not able to find any detailed data about these wolves. Ontario   *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author Wolves hunting Bison Taken from the book El Lobo (Shaun Ellis and Monty Sloan)
Here is a translation of Russian text posted kindly by @AlexE showing that sometimes wolves could be killed by adult male boar during the hunt. For first time I read from more serious documentary source that such a event could really occurred. Before I have heard such a stories only by my grand father back in Europe... The text bellow describes Kazahstan (Central Asia):
http://portaleco.ru/kaban-ekologija-i-hozjajstvennoe-znachenie/gibel-kabanov-ot-vragov.html "Sometimes attack of adult male boar on wolves ends with the dead of the predators especially if this occurs in conditions not allowing to wolves to jump aside from his canine teeth. For example at 15 January 1945 in the valley of Ili river 4 wolves attacked adult male feeding next to dense bushes. One of the predators died instantly. The boar cut off his abdomen and chest. Survived beasts ran away. 22 December 1946 in the same aria wolf pack of 9 attacked adult male feeding on small meadow among canes. At the place of attack we found a dead sub-adult male wolf with big wound in the groin aria. Checking the traces in the snow we concluded that the boar after killing the wolf escaped among the cane. January 1947 in the Geoununkt region we found a dead wolf killed by boar. The boar was attacked by 2 wolves. After interviewing local hunters in the aria of Ili and Alakull mountains it got clear that almost everybody of them during his career of boar hunting has ran into 1 to 3cases of wolves killed by boars. Large males almost doesn't afraid of wolves and cross a fresh wolf traces, however females with cubs rush aside and run away." Such an accidents could be explained only by the fact that the wolves were extremely hungry and desperate because normally predators don't risk their lives during the hunt. Here is copy of video showing boar-wolves interraction originally posted by @AlexE in boar thread. I am not able to say in what European country that happened: (03-13-2018, 05:52 AM)Wolverine Wrote: Here is a translation of Russian text posted kindly by @AlexE showing that sometimes wolves could be killed by adult male boar during the hunt. For first time I read from more serious documentary source that such a event could really occurred. Before I have heard such a stories only by my grand father back in Europe... The text bellow describes Kazahstan (Central Asia):@Wolverine Thanks a lot for your valuable information 
HOW THE DEATH OF ONE WOLF CAN AFFECT THE ENTIRE PACK: By Danielle Flam.
Can the death of a single wolf cause the rest of the pack to fall apart? Studies show it can, depending on which wolf is killed, the size of the pack, and the season. What happens to a pack when certain wolves, the alphas or other elders, for example, die? Wolves are extremely social animals that live in families. Each wolf plays an important role in the pack’s survival, from the rearing of pups to teaching the younger wolves how to hunt. Yet, the long-term effects of losing specific individuals from such highly complex social groups are still poorly understood. To begin to address this question, Bridget Borg, Scott Brainerd, Thomas Meier and Laura Prugh looked at what happens to a pack as well as to the overall wolf population following the death of a breeder (alpha female, alpha male or both). Specifically, Borg and her team studied individual pack fates, reproduction, and overall population growth following the loss of a breeder. How do you measure how the loss of a breeder impacts the fate of the pack? Bridget Borg, Scott Brainerd, Thomas Meier and Laura Prugh examined data from the past 26 years on 387 collared wolves in Denali National Park and Preserve (DNPP) in Alaska. The study area covered wolf habitat north and west of the Alaska Range in and adjacent to DNPP. The data came from wolf population monitoring efforts that began in 1986. Wolves in DNPP were radio collared and tracked using radiotelemetry. Borg et. al.’s study looked at data from packs monitored from 1986 to 2013. About 10-20 wolf packs were monitored each year, mostly within DNPP boundaries. Information such as wolf location, number of wolves in a pack, coat color, age, mortality, den site location and use, and pack affiliation were all recorded annually. Although wolves within DNPP are protected from hunting and trapping, outside of the park boundaries, wolves are subject to hunting and trapping during set seasons. Park wolves tend to follow caribou out of the park in an annual migration, exposing them to hunting and trapping when the season permits. What did Borg, Brainerd, Meier and Prugh find in their study, “Impacts of breeder loss on social structure, reproduction and population growth in a social canid”? What they found is that in 77% of the cases where a pack dissolved, the dissolution was preceded by the death of a breeder. Moreover, the pack was more likely to dissolve if both breeders or if just the alpha female (mother) died, and if the pack was small, or if the death occurred just before or during breeding season. But, interestingly, the loss of the alpha female and/or alpha pair didn’t appear to affect population growth that year or the following year. Scientists believe this is because wolves have compensatory breeding mechanisms. In intact packs, social carnivores like wolves suppress reproduction among others in the pack, essentially preventing them from breeding. But when the alpha pair is killed, there is no suppression, and as a result more and younger wolves tend to breed. This study also noted that when breeders die of natural causes, it was less likely to result in the pack dissolving than when the death of the breeder was human-caused. What percent of wolf deaths are human-caused? In the United States, wolf management strategy focuses on wolf population numbers. Methods currently used to ensure wolf populations remain at desired levels include: hunting, trapping, snaring and the federal lethal control of wolves. In Idaho, for example, over the past two years, 99% of documented wolf deaths were human-caused (2014 Idaho Wolf Monitoring Progress Report, Idaho Fish and Game). This method of population management removes individuals indiscriminately, not taking into account which wolf is killed, the wolves’ role in the familial structure, or the ways in which the loss of an individual wolf might affect the rest of the pack. It ignores how killing an important family member, like an alpha, might fundamentally alter the pack’s social structure, or even cause the family to break apart. Food for thought Should wolf management take individual pack structure into account when making decisions to lethally remove a member of a pack? Should hunting regulations be changed to somehow protect the alphas (breeders)? If so, how? Should hunting seasons be changed so as to not overlap with breeding season? Human-caused deaths in the study area were highest during winter and spring, which is just before and during breeding season for wolves. What are the other ways survivors of a pack might be affected when the pack falls apart due to human-take? Wolf families have been observed to lose knowledge (such as specific hunting techniques) passed down from generation to generation when the elder more knowledgeable wolves are killed and younger less experienced wolves are left to fend for themselves before having learned this specific pack culture (Gordon Haber observed this with the Toklat pack in Alaska). These types of losses are hard to measure scientifically. In Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel, Carl Safina argues that animals, like wolves and elephants, have rich mental lives. And that the loss of an individual from a family of wolves, elephants or dolphins, for example, can have a surprising impact on the long term survival of the family: When a poacher kills an elephant, he doesn’t just kill the elephant who dies. The family may lose the crucial memory of their elder matriarch, who knew where to travel during the very toughest years of drought to reach the food and water that would allow them to continue living. Thus one bullet may, years later, bring more deaths. Watching dolphins while thinking of elephants, what I realized is: when others recognize and depend on certain individuals, when a death makes the difference for individuals who survive, when relationships define us, we have traveled across a certain blurry boundary in the history of life on Earth—“it” has become “who.” “Who” animals know who they are; they know who their family and friends are. They know their enemies. They make strategic alliances and cope with chronic rivalries. They aspire to higher rank and wait for their chance to challenge the existing order. Their status affects their offspring’s prospects. Their life follows the arc of a career. Personal relationships define them. Sound familiar? Of course. “They” includes us. But a vivid, familiar life is not the domain of humans alone. (Safina 2015). Relationships define elephants, like they define wolves, like they define us. What happens to the survivors when individual family members are lost is a question that is perhaps hard to quantify, but the more closely we pay attention to these “who” animals and their relationships, the more clear the answer may become.
Credits to Deby Dixon.
Daddy Wapiti and 10 pups Actually, we don't know if the alpha male, 1015, fathered all eleven Wapiti pups (5 from 1091 and 6 from the white alpha) but it is unusual to get a shot of nearly all the pups and just one adult. The eleventh pup was also in this image, originally, but too far back. I finally got an ID on the two collared grey male pups and can tell which one is 1105 and which one is 1106 and got the weights of all three pups that were collared. That means that I can now identify half of the pack! All of those grey puppies make it so hard. BTW, it is almost birthday time for the pups next month. I believe they use April 15th. Boy will their lives change when the new puppies come along. They will no longer be the babies and it will be time to grow up and help find food. Puppy times sure was fun for me while it lasted.  *This image is copyright of its original author
Biologists solve mystery of black wolves: By Stuart Wolpert, February 05, 2009.
Why do nearly half of North American wolves have black coats while European wolves are overwhelmingly gray or white? The surprising answer, according to teams of biologists and molecular geneticists from Stanford University, UCLA, Sweden, Canada and Italy, is that the black coats are the result of historical matings between black dogs and wild gray wolves. The research, federally funded by the National Science Foundation, appears Feb. 5 in the online edition of the journal Science and will be published later in the journal's print edition. The scientists used molecular genetic techniques to analyze DNA sequences from 150 wolves, about half of them black, in Yellowstone National Park, which covers parts of Wyoming, Montana and Idaho. They found that a novel mutated variant of a gene in dogs, known as the K locus, is responsible for black coat color and was transferred to wolves through mating. The biologists are unsure of when the black coat color was transferred from dogs to wolves, but they believe it was not a recent occurrence; the black coat could not have spread as widely as it has throughout North America in just a few hundred years, they say. They suspect the transfer took place sometime before the arrival of Europeans to North America and involved dogs that were here with Native Americans. "This is the first example where a gene mutation originated in a domesticated species, was transferred to and became very common in a closely related wild species," said Robert Wayne, a UCLA professor of ecology and evolutionary biology and co-author of the Science paper. "Although genes that evolve under domestication may be transferred to wild species, they generally do not proliferate in the wild because the natural context is so different from that under domestication," Wayne said. "No one would have guessed that the common black coat color in North American wolves came from dogs — there is no precedent for it. Moreover, for whatever reason, the transfer of the black coat-color gene from dogs to wolves and its success in the wild occurred uniquely in North America. "Most mutations we see in dogs have been selected by humans, and we intuitively think they are unique to dogs," he said. "We don't think of short-legged wolves like dachshunds or wild wolves that look like Dalmatians. The surprise of this study is that black wolves have their black coat coloration as a gift from dogs. The products of artificial selection had added substantially to the genetic legacy of a wild species." Scientists have thought that coat color is related to camouflage, perhaps to hide wolves from their prey or from one another. "Apparently, natural selection has increased the frequency of black coat color dramatically in wolf populations across North America," Wayne said. "It must have adaptive value that we don't yet understand. It could be camouflage, or strengthening the immune system to combat pathogens, or it could reflect a preference to mate with individuals of a different coat color." Does this research have implications beyond dogs and wolves? "The underlying assumption is that genes from one species will be contained and not enter another species on a massive scale; this may not be true," Wayne said. "There may be implications for genetically modified organisms." "This work shows how domestication can preserve and ultimately enrich the genetic legacy of the original natural populations," said Gregory Barsh, a professor of genetics at Stanford University's School of Medicine and co-author of the Science paper. "Our work is on wolves, but there are many other examples of domestic plants — wheat, rice, maize, soybean — and animals — bison, cattle, cats — where gene flow from domesticated to natural populations has been documented." The lead authors of the paper are Tovi Anderson, a graduate student in Barsh's Stanford laboratory, and Bridgett vonHoldt, a UCLA graduate student of ecology and evolutionary biology who works in Wayne's laboratory. As part of the research on the Yellowstone wolves, VonHoldt conducted a genome scan and studied more than 50,000 genetic markers in order to assess genetic variation across wolf populations in relation to dogs. She and her colleagues examined whether there was any evidence elsewhere in the genome indicating that black wolves recently hybridized with dogs but could not find any. Black coyotes also have the same coat-color gene as domestic dogs, Anderson, vonHoldt and the co-authors report. The research was conducted by laboratory and field scientists with diverse backgrounds in conservation biology, ecology and molecular genetics. The collaboration will help to refine concepts relevant to both genetics and conservation biology with respect to understanding how different traits arise during evolution and how biological diversity can be nurtured and maintained, the scientists said. "My main interest is to describe the genetics of dog domestication — the geographic location of domestication and the genetic changes that led to the distinctive body forms evident in so many breeds," vonHoldt said. "I'm able to use a genome approach and look at many points along the dog genome to find interesting regions and whether these regions contain genes with known functions, and to extrapolate what that means for the domestication process of dogs. "We're trying to figure out whether the black coat color provides a fitness or behavioral advantage," she added, noting that Yellowstone National Park has a wealth of observational data that "we can integrate with our genetic data." "We can scan the dog's genome and find associations between a particular marker and a trait like foreshortened limbs or a specific coat color, or even behavioral traits," Wayne said. "We then examine the genes near those markers and identify candidates that may be responsible for the specific trait. Our hope is that we will find the genetic basis for traits having to do with behavior, speed, longevity or fecundity — all these traits that we measure in wild populations, but we do not yet understand their genetic basis." Yellowstone is home to the wolf population about which the most is known, Wayne said. Their behavior and reproduction have been well studied, including by one of Wayne's graduate students, Daniel Stahler, a co-author of the Science paper who works as a biologist for the Yellowstone National Park Gray Wolf Restoration Project. "The wolves of Yellowstone represent an unparalleled population for studying the inheritance of traits," Wayne said. "In Yellowstone, we have followed very precisely the inheritance of coat color throughout the entire wolf population and document that coat color is a trait inherited with just one gene involved, with two forms — one causing white and one causing black. This is the most comprehensive genealogical analysis of a North American carnivore population ever undertaken." Other co-authors on the paper are Sophie Candille, from Barsh's Stanford laboratory; Marco Musiani, a professor at the University of Calgary and former postdoctoral scholar in Wayne's laboratory; Claudia Greco, a graduate student from Italy who previously worked in Wayne's laboratory, and her adviser, Ettore Randi; Douglas W. Smith, project leader for the Yellowstone National Park Gray Wolf Restoration Project; Badri Padhukasahasram, a graduate student in the department of biological statistics and computational biology at Cornell University; Jennifer Leonard of Sweden's Uppsala University, a former Ph.D. student in Wayne's laboratory; Carlos Bustamante, a statistical population geneticist in the department of biological statistics and computational biology at Cornell; Elaine Ostrander of the National Human Genome Research Institute; and Hua Tang, from Barsh's laboratory. In previous research, Wayne and colleagues used molecular genetic techniques to determine that dogs have ancient origins, and that the first Americans to arrive in the New World more than 12,000 years ago brought domesticated dogs with them. They have also found that dogs have been living in close association with humans much longer than any other domestic animal, have confirmed that dogs evolved from wolves, and have confirmed that today's domestic horse resulted from the interbreeding of many lines of wild horses in multiple locations and was not confined to a small area or a single culture. 
himalayan wolf or woolly wolf -canis lupus chanco in Nepal himalaya
 *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author yellow or common version, Mt. Annapurna conservation area, Nepal  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author .. a distant shot of a black and regular wolf in Nepal  *This image is copyright of its original author
 (03-26-2018, 11:54 AM)Jimmy Wrote: himalayan wolf or woolly wolf -canis lupus chanco in Nepal himalaya The Himalayan wolf or Canis himalayensis (1st one) & Tibetan wolves or Canis lupus filchneri (latter) are now considered seperate species by some! (03-26-2018, 01:18 PM)Rishi Wrote:(03-26-2018, 11:54 AM)Jimmy Wrote: himalayan wolf or woolly wolf -canis lupus chanco in Nepal himalaya Is it?? Interesting! possible due to the fact there are many isolated valleys separated by chain of mountain barriers but still hard to believe cause the terrain for both the species are almost identical and prey species are so similar that they had avoided interbreeding for so long
@Jimmy Tibetan wolves are basically a subspecies of gray wolves like the Indian, Arabian, Eurasian etc.
But the Himalayan wolves, reportedly, seperated from them before that & probably can't interbreed with them anymore, or maybe the hybrids are infertile like ligers & tigons. Otherwise they would have surely merged back again. Now, claims like this are usually debated but mDNA studies pints at the possibility... Here's a taxonomic tree (Source):  *This image is copyright of its original author
Credits to Jason P. Ayers - Yellowstone.
The agony of defeat. In mid May 2017, I witnessed this lone, defeated looking wolf struggle across Lamar Valley after being attacked by a rival pack over a bison calf kill. With its tail tucked between its legs, I watched as it walked across the valley until it couldn’t any longer. It slumped down out of sight and I thought for sure that it would soon die afterwards. To my surprise, I learned later that it had in fact survived and appeared to have made a full recovery. Remarkably resilient creatures.  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author  *This image is copyright of its original author Lupine warfare is as ruthless as its feline counterpart, how I wish we could get more regular updates on the various packs and their status.
Credits to Nancy Gottschalk.
Good evening everyone!!! I could’nt have a better weekend in Yellowstone National Park. I had the chance to see bears, wolves and a lot more..., but the glorious moment was after waiting for about probably 6 hours to finally see at 926, from The Lamar Pack Wolves. She approached to this bison carcass. I’am so glad to see her so well an healthy, she looks pregnant and fortunately she has now a lot of food to eat with this bison carcass. I will continue posting more photos and videos of this amazing and unique wolf!!! I hope you will enjoy this photo and also like my page. https://m.facebook.com/NancyGottschalkFo...otography/  *This image is copyright of its original author
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