Grey Wolf

Canis lupus

Grey Wolf (Canis lupus) is a species in the genus Canis, family Canidae, order Carnivora.

Scientific classification

Description

The grey wolf is the largest wild member of the family Canidae, with adults typically weighing 30–50 kilograms; the largest animals occur in the north of the range and the smallest in the south, following the usual mammalian pattern. Coat colour is highly variable — grey, black, cream, white and mixtures of these — and is a poor guide to subspecies.

Distribution and habitat

Historically the wolf had one of the largest ranges of any land mammal, covering most of the Northern Hemisphere north of about 20°N. Persecution eliminated it from much of western Europe and the contiguous United States by the early twentieth century. Legal protection and reintroduction have since restored populations in parts of both, including the well-documented return to Yellowstone National Park from 1995.

Wolves are habitat generalists, occupying tundra, boreal and temperate forest, grassland, mountain and desert, limited less by vegetation than by prey availability and human tolerance.

Behaviour

The wolf pack is normally a family: a breeding pair and their offspring of one or more years, not a group of unrelated adults competing for rank. The "alpha wolf" model derived from captive groups of unrelated animals in the mid-twentieth century has been retracted by the researcher who popularised it, though it persists in popular writing.

Packs hunt cooperatively, taking prey much larger than an individual wolf could — moose, elk, bison, musk ox — usually by testing many animals and pursuing the vulnerable. Howling maintains contact across territories that can exceed 1,000 square kilometres.

References

• Mech, L. D. (1999). Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs. *Canadian

Journal of Zoology* 77.

• Mech, L. D. and Boitani, L., eds. (2003). Wolves: Behavior, Ecology, and Conservation.