How do wolves respond to pack mate injury during hunting?

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roguemoon
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How do wolves respond to pack mate injury during hunting?

Post by roguemoon » Wed Nov 18, 2020 5:55 pm

Wolves are always at risk of injury or death when hunting large prey. When a wolf is injured or killed during a hunt with the pack, how do the other wolves respond? I've been trying to dig up some info on this (wish I had Wolves on the Hunt by David Mech) but haven't found much. Will the pack stop hunting if a pack member is killed or injured? African wild dogs and some other social carnivores are known to do so. Or do they typically continue hunting, possibly caught up in the adrenaline, and respond to the injured or killed wolf after? Would love it if anyone has some sources or accounts on this!

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Re: How do wolves respond to pack mate injury during hunting?

Post by Koa » Wed Nov 25, 2020 4:23 am

Looking into this.

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Re: How do wolves respond to pack mate injury during hunting?

Post by -Wolfdog- » Sun Nov 29, 2020 2:44 pm

I'm not sure if this PDF might be of any use, but it focuses almost exclusively on wolf hunts and injury (including prey)? I think it could possibly address your question, but overall it's hard to find a definite answer to such a specific request.
https://www.researchgate.net/publicatio ... n_the_wolf
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Re: How do wolves respond to pack mate injury during hunting?

Post by Koa » Thu Jul 29, 2021 12:03 am

So sorry for the delay; I receive and answer more questions on the Discord channel now.

The quotes I have provided below are from a study about risk; this is the closest study I could find that answers your question. How wolves respond to a pack mate injury during (or after) a hunt may depend on a number of factors, including the type of prey hunted, pack size and composition, and the wolf's status in the pack (e.g., breeding pair member).
Extra wolves above the optimal hunting-group-size thresholds are needed when packs hunt larger, riskier prey, like moose, to provide substitute hunters when other wolves are injured (to maintain near-optimal hunting-group size) and to allow for pack provisioning and defence of the injured.
"Differential wolf-pack-size persistence and the role of risk when hunting dangerous prey," page 1483
https://www.jstor.org/stable/43956345

The article also poses a few interesting questions that it does not answer and encourages further study.
Breeders were more likely to attack and kill in large groups in YNP than non-breeders (MacNulty et al., 2012), perhaps due to different cost-benefit ratios for hunting risky prey (Mukherjee & Heithaus, 2013) given differences in their average relatedness to packmates. When breeders are injured from hunting risky prey, do non-breeders (more often free-riders* than breeders) in larger packs provision and defend them (from neighbouring wolves) and assume a more active role in attacking and killing risky prey? If breeders subsequently heal, do the non-breeders resume more frequent free-riding? More generally, it will be important to test whether the survival of injured wolves varies given pack size, whether packmates provision and defend injured wolves until they heal and can hunt again, and whether free-riders actively fill the injured wolf's role as a hunter. Of course, quantification of foraging-related injuries to predators is difficult to measure and likely under-estimated being based mostly on teeth or bones, with very little information available on soft-tissue injuries and recovery rates (Mukherjee & Heithaus,2013).
page 1484

(*Free-riding is defined as individual [wolves] withholding effort. See https://academic.oup.com/beheco/article/23/1/75/233162)

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