On Isle Royale, 15 or more ravens immediately descended on a moose kill.

Ravens weigh up to 2 pounds, but each raven can eat or stash twice its body weight-4 pounds of moose meat-per day. He did the calculations, and it was a lot. Vucetich wondered how much fresh moose the ravens were getting at a kill. When Vucetich flew in airplane surveys over the island, wolf packs were always in the company of the large, midnight-black birds. His data, which he wrote about in his book, Mind of the Raven, showed that ravens were found near wolf packs up to 99.7 percent of the time in winter at Yellowstone National Park. University of Vermont researcher Bernd Heinrich had already established that ravens and wolves are close associates. Maybe they have something to do with ,” said Vucetich. “It finally struck me that maybe the ravens aren’t just bystanders. Peterson has been working there since the 1970s, Vucetich since the ’90s, and at every wolf-kill site they encountered, the feasting wolf pack had company: Common Ravens. An island in Lake Superior, Isle Royale is an isolated wilderness laboratory and site of the longest large-mammal predator-prey relationship study ever conducted. That niggling question had bugged Michigan Technological University biologists John Vucetich and Rolf Peterson as they carried on the legacy of a 50-years-and-running research project to document the lives of wolf and moose populations at Isle Royale National Park. The challenge for scientists was to figure out why. But nearly everything in nature happens for a reason, including wolf pack formation.

And yet, wolves tend to hunt in packs of four or more.Įven taking into account the more frequent kill rate of a larger pack, a wolf duo should still get more meat, because they don’t have to share with as many other wolves. It was a mystery that had long nagged wolf researchers, a math problem that didn’t add up: based on per-capita meat acquisition from killing large prey, wolves would get the most meat if they hunted in pairs. Why do woodpeckers like to hammer on houses? And what can I do about it?

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