Do wolves ambush beavers? Video evidence for higher-order hunting strategies

Thomas D Gable, Trent Stanger, Steven K Windels, Joseph K. Bump

Research output: Contribution to journalArticlepeer-review

19 Scopus citations

Abstract

Over the past decade, there has been much debating about whether wolves possess high-order cognitive abilities that facilitate deliberate or cooperative hunting strategies such as ambush to capture prey. Beavers can be important alternate or primary prey for wolves in North America and Europe, but no observations of wolves hunting and killing beavers exist. We describe the first documented observation of a gray wolf killing a beaver, an observation that has provided valuable insight into how beavers defend themselves when attacked by wolves, how wolves hunt beavers, and the predatory strategies and cogni-tive abilities of wolves. Our observation confirms that wolves do hunt and kill beavers by surprising and ambushing them, which demonstrates that wolves have a unique ability to switch between cursorial and ambush hunting strategies depending on the prey. We suggest that wolves learn how to hunt beavers using high-order mental abilities combined with information learned from prior interactions with beavers.

Original languageEnglish (US)
Article numbere02159
JournalEcosphere
Volume9
Issue number3
DOIs
StatePublished - Mar 2018

Bibliographical note

Funding Information:
Resources Trust Fund and Van Sloun Foundation for providing support for this work. Additional funding was provided by National Science Foundation grants to JKB (NSF ID#1545611, NSF ID#1556676). We thank L. D. Mech for a helpful review of an earlier draft of this manuscript.

Funding Information:
We thank Voyageurs National Park, University of Minnesota, Minnesota Environment and Natural Resources Trust Fund and Van Sloun Foundation for providing support for this work. Additional funding was provided by National Science Foundation grants to JKB (NSF ID#1545611, NSF ID#1556676).

Publisher Copyright:
© 2018 The Authors.

Keywords

  • Alternate prey
  • Cognition
  • Hunting behavior
  • Kill site
  • Predation behavior
  • Predation risk
  • Predator-prey
  • Wolf predation

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