Nonbreeders, especially young adult females, routinely help breeders and in the process often enhance their own potential future reproductive success (e.g., by practicing for motherhood or delaying dispersal until there are better opportunities elsewhere). However, much of the helping I observed in Toklat and Savage River also appeared to be altruistic. Helpers included high-ranking, experienced adult males and females who deferred breeding even though they almost certainly could have dispersed from the group, found mates, and succeeded elsewhere. It was commonplace even for breeders to assist other breeders of the group, including by nursing and otherwise provisioning and protecting the young interchangeably. As described in chapter 3, I observed cooperative nursing by nonbreeding, pseudopregnant females as well. Young Toklat and Savage River wolves remained dependent beyond the summer homesite period for as long as three winters while developing full hunting proficiency. Not surprisingly, much of the helping and related behavior that I observed, such as the division of leadership between the Savage River alpha and beta males, was prominently on display year-around.
Some form of reciprocity apparently also operated. The two adult males from two hundred miles away that took over the Toklat family two months after the established Toklat alpha male was killed, and helped raise the dead male's four unrelated newborn pups, did so with what appeared to be the same dedicated behavior, including displays of affection, as the mother and older siblings. Yearling helpers play an important role in caring for new pups; thus there was a potential genetic payoff for one of the new males (the new alpha) the next breeding season when he produced his own litter.
There were also high levels of cooperation during hunting activities, as described in chapter 7. Among the Toklat and Savage River cooperative hunting tactics I have observed:
• Coordinated setup of attacks on caribou, sheep, and moose from up to several miles away and several directions, including by driving them into difficult escape terrain.
• Storming and then closely circling a moose to test it.
• Chasing sheep, caribou, and moose to one or more wolves waiting in ambush.
• Ambushing moose or caribou at a mineral lick.
• Decoying caribou while other wolves stalk from behind or on a flank.
• Killing a moose by holding its nose and anchoring the dangerous front hooves while other wolves attack from the rear and elsewhere.
Perhaps the ultimate cooperation is the close inbreeding that Toklat, Savage River, and other wolves seem able to do successfully. For example, six Toklat wolves, all almost certainly from the 2003–2004 litters, produced eight pups in 2005 and six in 2006, with high survival rates in both cases. The dominant pair of the six also produced at least five pups in 2007 and six in 2008. There was high survival of the 2007 pups through at least eight months of age, but the snaring losses in February make it impossible to determine any level of natural survival thereafter. The Savage River alpha male, whose mate was shot in 1968, almost certainly mated with two daughters from the 1968 litter in 1970–1973 (with one in 1970–1971 until she disappeared, then with the other, who was subordinate to the first). These four primary matings produced twenty-seven pups, including a litter of nine in 1970. I observed intense sexual activity between two of the 1970 pups in 1972. Two months later a young female produced a litter of at least four pups that was raised in the group together with the primary litter of five.
Inbreeding has negative consequences for many species. However, highly social species may avoid or offset these problems in unanticipated ways. Well-established wolf social systems are relatively closed to newcomers, and, more important, newcomer breeding; this may facilitate purging of genetic loads (deleterious recessive genes). Advantages accruing from sophisticated cooperation among close kin could also offset disadvantages from any losses of phenotypic variation or the effects of inbreeding depression. Recent research on a small Scandinavian wolf population indicates that inbreeding, at least to the level of sibling matings, does not necessarily lead to a major loss of genetic variation in the first place, least of all among the breeders.
Understanding the roots of cooperative behavior, including our own behavior, is among the most important endeavors in all of scientific inquiry. To be able to observe the forgoing and other details of behavior for the same groups of wolves in the wild for decades presents one of the rarest and most direct opportunities for new insights into these roots. Given the likelihood that wolf social organization provides an excellent model for early human societies (perhaps even better than nonhuman primates), continuing to allow the Toklat and other Denali wolves to be trapped and shot is especially foolhardy.
Family Lineages and Genetic Dilution
Wolves typically live in social groups consisting of breeding adults, their offspring from multiple years, and siblings. Simply put, they live in “families,” most commonly extended families, in both biological and commonsense interpretations of the term. “Family” is not human-specific. Along with related terms such as “mother,” “father,” “daughter,” “sister,” “brother,” and “uncle,” it has long seen routine use in the world's leading scientific journals (e.g., Science, Nature, Conservation Biology) in papers about aspects of social organization in nonhuman species.
The use of the term “family” with regard to wolves is sometimes belittled in Alaska. However, any biologist who belittles the use of this term for wolves or other species reveals his or her ignorance of the scientific literature and knowledge about one of the most active areas in all of science—sociobiology—and may also be betraying his own underlying social or political agenda. The term “pack” is unscientific and misleading. Not only does it fail to convey the fascinating essence of what sets wolf social organization apart from the organization of many other species, but it connotes almost the opposite. It is used by many biologists and others for little reason other than that many use it.
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Tweet
July 17, 2009
No see attack goshawk or jump any moose or bears on hike out tonite, in rain. Worried about lightning strikes while crossing the subalpine.
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By “family lineage” I refer to the continuity arising from combined learning-based and genetic transfer of information across generations of a family. A family's history consists of social as well as genetic continuity. Observations of the Toklat wolves since 1966 indicate both kinds of continuity and confirm they are a single, seventy-year-old or older family lineage rather than two or more consecutively recolonizing families.
The close radio-telemetry contact that has been maintained with these wolves since 1987 should not leave any doubt as to continuity from both standpoints over the last twenty-one years. The overlapping “timelines” of at least a dozen wolves that I (and others) could identify during the previous twenty-one years, including two wolves that were subsequently radio-collared in 1987 and 1991 as the primary male and female breeders, provide one indication that a single family lineage spans both periods. Overlapping spatial and behavioral traditions provide another. For example, not only did wolves continue to use the same homesites during both periods, they also varied their winter-summer occupancy among certain sites in the same ways. In the most striking example, adults repeatedly moved pups between two major denning complexes during both periods, using the same fourteen-mile route each time.
Some biologists question my reference to Toklat as a continuing family lineage because, they argue, the original genes would be so “diluted” after such a long period of time. First, this overlooks the importance of social continuity. Second, for what social group, of any species, do the original genes not become diluted? There may be much less dilution in groups like Toklat and Savage River than in most human families, given that the wolves seem able to inbreed and newcomers become breeders less often.
To use an example from our own species, generations of the McDonald family have maintained the same Nebraska farmstead for more than 150 years. Some offsprin
g have dispersed to distant areas, and some have started new farms nearby. But together with marital and adopted newcomers, other offspring remain on the farm and define a core family lineage. They have progressively diluted old McDonald's (and Mrs. McDonald's) genes, but there is also social continuity. The original (renovated) house and barns that old McDonald built are still home. They celebrate the harvest with remembrances of the old man and the farm's trials and tribulations. Their children still gather mushrooms in the woodlot next to the south forty. Most of the original farmstead remains in production with much the same schedule of crop rotations, though some inferior acreage has been sold on one side and productive neighboring acreage annexed on another.
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Field notes #133
June 2006
5:25—I hear one 2–3 sec howl-moan and then a 5 sec mini chorus of howls from several wolves and even some pups—coming from atop bluff near or even a bit N of gulley.
5:39—I howl 3 times
5:44—a chorus of howl of at least 4–5 adult wolves answers—2–3 rounds for about 1 min.
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Distinct short-lived and persistent human farm family lineages can be identified in mosaics across the landscape, the latter especially where soil and water conditions are the best. And for the oldest of these we recognize special cultural, aesthetic, biological, and other values, just as we should recognize the enormous values of an old nonhuman family lineage such as the Toklat wolves of Denali National Park.
Persistent Effects of Human-Caused Deaths
As noted in chapters 12 and 13, although wolf numbers often rebound from public hunting, trapping, and heavier agency killing, at least in the short term, the repercussions are distinct and long-lasting. There are lost traditions, fragmentation, and continued mortality long after direct killings. Effects can be felt for generations.
The Toklat lineage and the effects of human-caused deaths, described in chapter 2, provide a compelling example—especially the repercussions of the alpha male's death during radio-collaring by the National Park Service in March 2001. Prior to his death, the alpha male and his mate were the core of the Toklat family's social structure. Six months after his death, his last litter of four pups disappeared, most likely because of another radio-collaring effort.
Soon after, two adult males joined the group and immediately began caring for the new pups as if they were their own. At first, the alpha female was accepting of them during the annual round of courtship and mating. However, the dominant newcomer and the alpha female's oldest daughter ended up as the primary mating pair, and the alpha female began spending most of her time alone. Sometimes she was joined for short periods by one or two of her older offspring but never with either of the newcomer males. There was no obvious indication of hostility by any others toward her. It seemed that the separation was her choice. At one point she was joined by a male who lived thirty miles west, after he and his mate had become separated during a skirmish with other wolves. He soon left, however, eventually relocating his own mate and returning with her to their home territory.
When it came time for pups to be born, the Toklat daughter, with five other adults in close attendance, settled into the same established den that Toklat had occupied the previous three summers. The alpha female, still primarily on her own, occupied another den ten miles away, in the area where she and her dead mate had produced their first litter. By this time, her lower hunting success as a loner was taking a toll. She produced only two pups, both of which died before emerging from the den. Two months later, still mostly on her own, she finally starved to death, so weak she couldn't stand. Such is the longer-term impact of hunting/trapping kills of certain individuals in a wolf family.
It was a sad ending for this small but smart, resourceful female still in her prime, one of my all-time favorite wolves. She and her dead mate, who likewise was in his prime, were one of the closest, most efficient pair bonds I have known. In retrospect, maybe it shouldn't be much of a surprise that she didn't pair again, despite at least two apparent opportunities, and ended up the odd female out in her own family.
Of all the arguments considered in how to manage wildlife, perhaps the most important has to do with diversity—the variety of life about us. For full expression of its marvelous potentials, the human mind needs to grow in as varied an atmosphere as possible. Variety of all forms—not only biological, but cultural and social—is needed to stimulate our thinking and to sharpen our powers of imagination; it freshens our ability to find new solutions to old problems and leads to higher levels of creativity. Variety nurtures the mind and the spirit and is as vital to our well-being as the food we eat. In short, it helps to make us more human.
But we are unknowingly destroying the very treasure on which we thrive and, in fact, depend. A sameness results with a numbing of the spirit, and we gradually lose our ability to marvel. The battle to protect wolves or a wild caribou herd, alligators or whales, or another tract of wilderness isn't a plot to lock wilderness and wildlife away. This battle really represents an attempt to ensure that we do not neglect some of our most basic nonmaterial needs. It is nothing less than a matter of helping ourselves toward full achievement of the human promise.
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Snapshot: Last Phone Call
Barbara Brease
The last phone call I had with Gordon, we talked about the politics of wolf hunting—the liberal hunting across the state, as well as what was happening in the park. It was so much bigger than simply a mandate from Alaska's governor; it was coming from other organizations and people outside Alaska.
On that last phone call, I told him that I understood what he'd been saying, why killing wolves wasn't effective for increasing prey populations. “I know you understand,” he said. And after all those years of our conversations, I'm glad he said that at the very end, “you understand.”
I asked him if he'd work with students to share his information in case something happened to him, and he said, “Nothing's gonna happen to me; I've got too much work to do.” And that was a week before he died.
The day he died was so strange. Before we even knew he was missing, we had all these animals hanging around. A fox started screaming the night before. She screamed that afternoon and the following night. It was a very unusual, high-pitched screaming that we had never heard before. That day, there were ravens on our roof, magpies on our roof, a gray jay tapping on the window—very unusual stuff, all happening at once.
Then my friend Susan called me. She and her husband were hiking up the ridge from their cabin near Pinto Creek. They were up above a cloud layer, so clouds obscured the view below, but they could hear a plane circling. Then it just stopped. And the wolves started howling, she couldn't believe how long the wolves howled. She'd been going out there for twenty-five years and had never heard a howling like that.
They didn't even think about it being a plane crash, but the next day, after we found out Gordon was missing, her husband called the rangers and helped them narrow their search.
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Significant Findings of Gordon Haber's Wolf Research
Social Attributes
• Wolves are perhaps the most social of all nonhuman vertebrates. Wolf family social ties are unsurpassed, even among humans. Wolves will go to tremendous effort to remain with their families (relocated wolves have traveled hundreds of miles to return to their families).
• Each individual wolf has its own personality, and their ability to express emotions becomes obvious after one watches the same individuals for even a short time.
• Wolves are monogamous, and their reproductive bonds are at the heart of wolf social organization.
• As they become finely tuned to their territories, each wolf family group will develop its own unique adaptive behaviors and traditions; taken together, these can be considered a culture.
• Wolf social organization and success are based on two evolutionary strategies that are rare among verte
brates: (1) cooperative breeding/rearing—nonbreeders altruistically attend the breeding pair, as well as cooperatively nurse, babysit, teach, guard, and raise pups; and (2) cooperative hunting—adults cooperate in stalking and killing prey.
• Wolf groups do not often accept unfamiliar wolves trespassing into their territory but will adopt newcomers at times, especially if the group has been fragmented and reduced by human exploitation.
• Deaths from intergroup fighting do occur but appear to constitute only 10 to 20 percent of a family group's total natural (non-human-caused) winter losses from death and dispersal.
• Wolves howl to communicate with other group members, to locate one another, to announce their return from a hunt, when they or other members of the group are in pain or distress (e.g., caught in a trap), to energize the group after a rest, as a form of socializing that helps to maintain important bonds, to express a range of emotions, to advertise their territorial boundaries, and simply for the joy of howling.
• Play is a very important form of maintaining social bonds (in addition to chorus howling, etc.), and wolves usually play at least every thirty minutes.
• Wolves cross large rivers by reading the currents to project their own float path and then let the currents take them diagonally across with minimal effort.
Among Wolves: Gordon Haber's Insights into Alaska's Most Misunderstood Animal Page 22
