Wolf Social Intelligence

By whatever measures scientists choose for social intelligence, behavioral resilience of wolves illustrates their adaptations to changing aspects of their environments in the wild and captivity. Intriguing questions about wolves have emerged from studies of life history traits in social carnivores, such as large body size, delayed reproduction, and variable dispersal patterns. In this social context, the rapidly accumulating evidence for behavioral flexibility of wolves is reviewed in terms of learning, communication, problem-solving, and awareness. Changing aspects of the social environment include interactions with littermates, care-givers, mates, rivals for mates, hostile neighboring groups and permeability of group barriers to immigration. Hypotheses about the adaptive significance of behavioral resilience are examined for each of the major stages in the lifetime trajectory of individual wolves: dependent pups, pre-reproductive adults, reproductive adults and post-reproductive adults. The emerging answers point toward moving beyond simplistic notions that wolves are social due to the benefits of group hunting, to examine the more complex, and fascinating, intersection of evolutionary processes at nested levels of individuals, kin-groups, dynamic isolation of populations, and inter-species competition. Shifting proximate benefits and costs of apparent monogamy may have far reaching implications for designing effective conservation strategies based on a biological understanding of behavioral mechanisms in wolves.