The idea of the dominant animal - or alpha - in a wolf pack is no longer as reliable as it used to be, and researchers prove it.
He is about to end up run over, his mother saves himThe idea of the dominant animal - or alpha - in a pack of wild wolves is no longer as reliable as it was believed, and researchers prove it.
Il concept of "alpha", used since 1940 to designate the wolf pack leader, male or female, who competes for his position is false and has been disproved by current research by ethologists and other scholars who have shown how incorrect this opinion is when it comes to wild wolves.
It is in fact a concept that has found a very wide diffusion in popular culture, but which has no correspondence in the nature of wolves in the wild if one imagines one. clash of similar to excel.
This is the main point that ethologists have revised. In fact, there would be a male or female leader in the pack, but the wolves would become only through mating and / or giving birth to puppies, as the biologist David Mech has proven in his publications, observing a pack of wolves in Canada for 13 summers and pointing out that clashes between wolves would be very rare, having never seen any in that long period of time.
In the case of wolves of Scandinavia, whose herds would almost always consist of 6 members including two adults and four cubs, the situation would still be different. The researcher Barbara Zimmermann has in fact noticed that one would be created between the two adult specimens report a lot intense, made up of mutual aid rather than competition. Of this close-knit team of course also the puppies that gradually learn from the family to hunt, up to go away to create their own herd.
More than the leader of the pack, we should therefore speak of group, where each member has a specific role, but not conquered by contention. The pack would therefore resemble a family with more or less kinship ties between wolves.
Fonte: International Wolf Center
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