When it comes to wanting to appease youngsters and letting children play it seems there isn’t as much difference between humans and wolves as once thought. Yellowstone National Park biologists recently documented adult wolves doing something unusual. The adult wolves carried back “toys” for their pups to play with.
Yellowstone National Park shared a video on Instagram and wrote, “This spring, Yellowstone biologists documented adult wolves from the Mollie’s Pack traveling back to their den with some interesting items.” These items included bones and antlers and sticks.
The scientists reasoned that the “toys” help the adults as much as the pups and wrote, “Pups await food deliveries from successful hunts, but in the absence of food adults bring ‘toys.’ The instinct to bring items back to the den may be reinforced by evolution, and probably helps keep adults from being mobbed by sharp puppy teeth.”
The sharp teeth sound like a pretty good reason for toys! The park also shared that “Yellowstone wolf packs typically have one litter of 4 to 5 pups each year. By late October, pups are two-thirds of their adult size and start traveling with the pack.”
Yellowstone National Park
They added that the pups that survive the winter have learned the skills that help the pack survive such as hunting large prey like elk and bison. They also said that the young wolves “will help raise the pack’s next litter of pups” by “delivering food, and sometimes toys.”
Wolves had always been part of Yellowstone prior to the 1900s but they were hunted virtually to extinction there. An innovative program reintroduced gray wolves from Montana and Canada into the park in the 1990s. Many agree the reintroduction has been an environmental success. Some of those unexpected benefits are explored in a video entitled “How Wolves Change Rivers.”
You can learn more about the wolves in Yellowstone park at their website.
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This spring, Yellowstone biologists documented adult wolves from the Mollie’s Pack traveling back to their den with some interesting items. Pups await food deliveries from successful hunts, but in the absence of food adults bring “toys.” The instinct to bring items back to the den may be reinforced by evolution, and probably helps keep adults from being mobbed by sharp puppy teeth.
Yellowstone wolf packs typically have one litter of 4 to 5 pups each year. By late October, pups are two-thirds of their adult size and start traveling with the pack. Pups that survive the winter have learned to help the pack hunt large prey like elk and bison and will help raise the pack’s next litter of pups—delivering food, and sometimes toys.
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