Dreaded wolf-howl about loss - NRK

class=”publish-date” title=”26.09.2013, Cl. 09.22.”> Published 26.09.2013, at. 09.22.

How much wolf howls is more about the relationship with other wolves than about stress reactions.

shows new findings recently published in the journal Current Biology.

May vary howling

researchers would investigate why wolves howl as they do.

Is it stress hormones in the body that determines how much they howl and the loud, as when they are protecting their territory? Or Ulen vary from those social situations wolf is?

It appears that the wolf, who is also a social creature, player aware of their index. Among other uses howling to express the loss.

– Wolves can to some extent be able to vary the sounds, says researcher Friederike Range of the University of Veterinary Medicine Vienna, Austria.

not stressed

When a close friend is removed from the pack howling becomes more powerful, the study shows.

researchers have admittedly not been out in the wild nature in their attempts to find out how much wolves can check howling.

Instead, they studied nine wolves from two herds of Austrian Wolf Science Center in Ernstbrunn, 4 mil north of Vienna.

researchers measured including what happened to the wolves, when one of his friends were taken out of the herd to go alone. Such walks are some zookeepers will arrange to quite often.

results show in fact that there was no correlation between the levels of the stress hormone cortisol and the amount hoot.

– Covering mechanisms are not completely

Wolf Scientist Petter Wabakken at Hedmark University College researching wolves in the wild nature, including animal social behavior.

– It is previously known that wolf howl linked to rank, and I think therefore it is so surprised that wolves howl extra when they are attached to, removed from the herd, he says to forskning.no.

Although Wabakken are most concerned about wolves in the wild, he understands the desire to distinguish the purely physical from the emotional in an experiment in a controlled environment.

– The starting point for the study is intriguing. Researchers attempting to demonstrate that the physiological, stress hormones, have secondary importance. But they fail to reveal the mechanisms behind the sounds in its totality, says Wabakken.

objected that the frames can affect

his objection against experiments on animals in captivity is that there are people who put together the animals in herds and not the animals themselves.

– When researchers in their attempts in the park takes out one of the dominant parent pair in a wolf pack, so they make a sort of dissension which almost never occurs naturally.

– Except when the pups are young, parents are together 99 percent of the time, and both parents usually leave offspring together, says Wabakken.

Wolves that kill each other

From previous studies, scientists have found out a good deal about ulehyl.

– Hoot is primarily a way to keep in touch over long distances. A wolf can hear at least 8 to 10 kilometers as the crow flies.

– How can the wolves stay in contact with flock members whose herd is split, but they can also communicate with other herds, and say that we have a territory that we will defend, he said.

In North America, where it is larger and denser wolf populations, is howling especially on territorial control. Not infrequently it happens that wolves kill each other in territorial boundaries, when it becomes stressful because of food shortages.

In Scandinavia, the wolf food, such as elk and deer in abundance. It belongs therefore to the favors that wolves kill each other here.

Communicates well with odor

wolves howl thus both to protect the territory, but also to meet or do not meet each other.

– Next to howl at range, which has a short duration, so also communicates wolves by scent marking.

– The animal emits odor from glands in their paws and can hang again in an area for months, says Wabakken.