|
Post by OldGreenGrolar on Oct 11, 2021 22:16:22 GMT -5
Found another one. This is one of the best pictures in my opinion.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Oct 12, 2021 3:39:44 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Oct 12, 2021 18:15:31 GMT -5
www.macleans.ca/society/environment/one-giant-paw-print-stirs-an-age-old-debate-how-big-can-a-wolf-be/?utm_medium=organic&utm_source=Facebook&fbclid=IwAR2cgLmJl9YKKhNb3TT3XdjNSwqkfHVOYEWacl1tztnQh-oNKFvCiE4zrGE#Echobox=1633730422 One giant paw-print stirs an age-old debate: how big can a wolf be? A man in the Northwest Territories spotted giant wolf tracks, 7½ inches long. Anything longer than 5½ inches is Amarok territory—the legendary lupine of Inuit folklore. Years ago, on a dark December morning, Ron Doctor was driving alone through the snowy hinterlands of the Northwest Territories when he spotted something odd in the thick, fresh snow. He couldn’t get a good look, so he drove home and returned to the scene during his precious four-hour window of subarctic daylight. The second visit confirmed his suspicions: these were giant wolf tracks, 7½ inches long. “Holy smoke,” the veteran wildlife officer thought to himself. “This is unreal.” He’d never seen a wolf track that big. Doctor gauged the distance between each print—six or seven feet. Head to tail, the beast itself could be as long as eight. He laid his left hand next to the feral vestige and snapped a photo, impressing friends and family, and eventually—out of the blue in January—getting posted to CBC North’s website and going semi-viral on Twitter. “We know there’s wolves around,” he says. “But that size—nobody’s ever seen a track that size.” Doctor lives in Tulita, a remote hamlet of 477 people nestled at the junction of the Great Bear and Mackenzie rivers. The legendary Mackenzie is the longest waterway in Canada, whose basin is home to the Mackenzie Valley wolves, among the largest gray wolves in North America. Females can reach 100 lb., but males routinely top 120. Their prints extend 5½ inches. Anything longer is sasquatch territory. Or, more accurately, Amarok territory. That’s the legendary lupine of Inuit folklore—a godlike creature who kills lone hunters at night. Most wolves are not Amarok. Sources are foggy on the biggest wolf ever caught, but an Alaskan hunter once bagged a 175-lb. one. That was in 1939, and a few 140-pounders have been caught since. But unlike the mythical Inuit wolf lord, none of them stalked human prey. “It’s amazing to me that wolves don’t attack people more often,” says Dean Cluff, a regional biologist for the North Slave Region of the Northwest Territories. “Because they certainly could. If they knew how weak we were, they would.” Instead, wolves prefer to compete with their Inuit neighbours for moose and caribou. The latter presents a problem, because Canadian caribou are heading toward extinction. In the spring of 2020, the government of the Northwest Territories spent more than $320,000 to snipe wolves from a helicopter to protect the Bathurst and Bluenose-East caribou herds. (This is not unique; during the winter of 2019-2020, British Columbia spent almost $2 million to cull 463 wolves from caribou regions.) In 2015, the territory began awarding $200 for each wolf carcass delivered to its Department of Environment and Natural Resources.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Mar 19, 2022 1:15:46 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Apr 7, 2022 5:24:02 GMT -5
Genomic effects of inbreeding on Scandinavian wolves httFor many years, researchers at Uppsala University have been exploring the genetic origins of the Scandinavian grey wolf population, which was founded by only three immigrating wolves. In their new study the scientists show that, after five generations of inbreeding, between 10 and 25 per cent of the original genetic variation has been eliminated.
The fact that inbreeding is harmful and may directly cause extinction of endangered species is well known. But no research has ever been done to find out exactly how much genetic variation is lost because of closely related individuals mating with one another, or how it occurs.
The Scandinavian wolf population was founded by three individual wolves immigrating from Finland in the early 1980s. Geneticists at the University's Evolutionary Biology Centre have now, by following trends of the population, been able to see the genomic effects of inbreeding over several generations.
Like us humans, all wolves have two slightly different versions or "copies" of every single chromosome in their DNA. The three founders of the wolf population thus contributed a total of six of every chromosome. The minor differences among these versions made up the baseline genetic variation in the population.
"We determined the DNA sequence for each of the six 'starting chromosomes' and for all the chromosomes of about a hundred wolves born from the 1980s to the present. We were then able to follow how far the starting chromosomes 'survived' from one generation to the next. What happened was that parts of them gradually disappeared from the population, so that the variation was lost," says Hans Ellegren, Professor of Evolutionary Biology at Uppsala University. The study is unique in that the researchers managed to follow the inheritance of so-called haplotypes. A haplotype is the linear combination of genetic variants along a chromosome. Current technology cannot distinguish the two haplotypes when one determines the DNA sequence of a biological sample. What the researchers now did could be seen as doing a jigsaw puzzle. By following the inheritance of chromosomes, they could deduce the composition of haplotypes.
When genetic variation is lost in a population, there is a deterioration in the individuals' ability to face change and challenges. Some of the variants eliminated may have been important for the wolves' further adaptive capacity. Others may have played a vital role as protection against genetic predisposition to disease.
In a population started by so few individuals, a genetic variant can easily disappear altogether. It cannot then be re-created without an influx of individuals.
"We found that, after five generations of inbreeding, 10 to 25 per cent of the genetic variation that the three founders brought with them had been lost. In total, no fewer than 160,000 genetic variants disappeared -- a surprisingly large number," Ellegren says.
An additional problem for the Scandinavian wolf population is that the three founders also turned out not to have been entirely unrelated to one another. Together, as mentioned above, they had contributed six chromosome "copies" but, in practice, these represented only about four different versions on average, since the animals were already related.
The results from the study have a general bearing on the implications of inbreeding in animal species.
"One key conclusion is that inbred populations need a supply of new genetic material, preferably with a provenance as different as possible from that of the population itself. To assess the extent of loss of genetic variation, you also need to be aware of how much variation there actually was from the start," Ellegren says. A few immigrating wolves have contributed new genetic variants to the population in recent years. Still, however, the extent of inbreeding is so large that also these variants run the risk of getting lost.
The study was conducted in collaboration with researchers at Grimsö Wildlife Research Station and from Norway. _________________________________________________________________________________________ Story Source:
Materials provided by Uppsala University. Original written by Linda Koffmar. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on May 11, 2022 18:42:31 GMT -5
Up until just a few years ago, I believed the brown bear to be too powerful for even a large pack of wolves to kill. This seemed evident considering that a big male grizzly can displace even a large pack of wolves from their kill. But, I was wrong. Each wolf is loyal and dedicated to his pack. This is what makes dogs the ideal animal companion for us humans. Even though a large pack of wolves could kill a large brown bear, they choose not to, because in doing so, most likely one or more wolves would die in this battle. One carcass is not worth the cost of a pack member. Over in Russia, the brown bear and the tiger treat the wolf very differently. The intelligent bear takes advantage of the wolf's hunting skills. He has learned, over the course of untold centuries, that he can take a carcass from the wolves with little or no fighting. Therefore, the wolves are actually beneficial to the brown bear. The tiger, on the other hand, is hard-wired to be an ambush predator. Even though he will not turn down a ready-killed carcass should he blunder onto one, his mind is focused on hunting. Therefore, the tiger views the wolves as competition for large prey animals. The tiger will try, and is often successful, to chase every wolf from his territory. Bears will also often leave an area heavily populated by tigers. Tigers prey upon bears smaller than themselves. This means all but the biggest male black bears, adolescent brown bears, and even adult female brown bears. If the she-bears leave, then the adult males soon follow. As for the wolves, tigers are a much bigger threat to them than a bear. And, as with the bear, a large pack of wolves could kill a tiger, but the price is too heavy for the wolves to stand their ground and fight.
|
|
|
Post by Montezuma on Jun 18, 2022 23:55:50 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by Montezuma on Jun 18, 2022 23:57:31 GMT -5
"In the other four instances it appeared the wolves were attempting to make a kill, particularly of cubs when present. One young adult grizzly (Appendix IX - Savage, 1967) was at an obvious disadvantage in deep, melting snow, and when last observed the wolves had bloodied its hindquarters and were continuing to press the attack."
open.library.ubc.ca/soa/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/831/items/1.0094168
|
|
|
Post by Montezuma on Jun 19, 2022 0:19:40 GMT -5
Here is the summary to brown bear vs wolf thread:-
1#. Adult male brown bears invariably dominate wolf packs, no matter how large pack size is.
2#. There is no confirmed/unconfirmed case of an adult male grizzly killed by wolves.
3#. Adult male grizzlies are not vulnerable to another animal attack, including wolves, with the exception of another male bear.
4#. Male brown bears do not generally kill wolves but they are known to kill wolves in fierce disputes and take out wolf pups from their dens.
5#. Male bruins are prominent "kleptoparasites" of wolves and are known to track wolves for long distances either to usurp their prey or eat the left-overs.
6#. Fully-grown male bears pose threat to wolves.
7#. There are some records of wolves killing female and young brown bears, most likely in hibetnation.
8#. Wolves, with their superior numbers, pose threat to brown bear's cubs and have been known to attack and rarely kill them.
9#. Female brown bears, unlike males, do not track wolves for food, but would scavenge on the left overs.
10#. Females prefer not to meet the wolves since wolves can pose threat to cubs and neither the wolves want to meet a fierce mama bear.
|
|
|
Post by Montezuma on Jun 19, 2022 0:25:17 GMT -5
Summary of black bear and wolves intereaction. 1#. Unlike their larger cousin, the black bear generally do not dominate wolves.
2#. Wolves react aggressively against black bears and are more likely to dominate the passive bear.
3#. Black bears however are known to chase away wolves and mostly do not fear wolves.
4#. Blackies are known to scavenge on the remains of wolf's kills.
5#. There are well-known cases of wolves attacking, killing and eating black bears especially when these bears are in their vulnerable condition, hibernation.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Jun 30, 2022 1:17:25 GMT -5
Ice Age wolf DNA reveals dogs trace ancestry to two separate wolf populations Date: June 29, 2022 www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2022/06/220629121135.htm An international group of geneticists and archaeologists, led by the Francis Crick Institute, have found that the ancestry of dogs can be traced to at least two populations of ancient wolves. The work moves us a step closer to uncovering the mystery of where dogs underwent domestication, one of the biggest unanswered questions about human prehistory.
|
|
Deleted
Deleted Member
Posts: 0
|
Post by Deleted on Jul 1, 2022 14:44:04 GMT -5
Very good
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Aug 6, 2022 8:03:07 GMT -5
I'm unsure where this video was taken. Wolves look different from the grey wolves of N. America. Bear appears to be some subspecies of brown bear.
|
|
|
Post by arctozilla on Aug 6, 2022 10:56:38 GMT -5
/\ to me it seems a black bear. It has long ears.
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Aug 7, 2022 6:34:22 GMT -5
/\ to me it seems a black bear. It has long ears. Well, it seems that the video vanished...
|
|
|
Post by brobear on Aug 10, 2022 15:33:25 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by Montezuma on Jan 7, 2023 19:14:33 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by Montezuma on May 20, 2023 21:25:10 GMT -5
While brown bears effect wolf populations, wolves don't: a typical ecology between dominant and subordinate carnivores. "Bear density has a negative effect on the probability of wolf pairs establishing in a given area (Ordiz et al., 2015), and wolf kill rates are lower when bears are present (Tallian et al., 2017). However, no effects of wolves have ever been documented on brown bears at the population level."www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6303696/#:~:text=Bear%20density%20has%20a%20negative,bears%20at%20the%20population%20level.
|
|
|
Post by Montezuma on Oct 7, 2023 12:07:41 GMT -5
|
|
|
Post by Montezuma on Jan 27, 2024 2:27:46 GMT -5
"Adult male brown bears steal away food from wolf packs regardless of any size".
|
|