Wolves are slightly smaller than cougars, and in terms of fighting alone, wolves are not as good as cougars. But wolves have an advantage in that they live in packs. In North America, a pack of wolves usually has 7 to 10 individuals, and some can have more than 20 individuals.
Wolves will take advantage of their numerical advantage to adopt a strong attack strategy against cougars. They will directly rob the cougars of their food, making the cougars feel hungry and tired, thereby achieving the goal of driving away the cougars.
Wolves will know where the cougars have caught their prey through the cries of the prey, the smell of blood, and the crows circling in the sky. In order to survive, the cougar has no choice but to run away and abandon the prey it worked so hard to catch.
Experts have found that it is common for wolves to steal prey from cougars. For example, in Banff National Park in Canada, 40% of mountain lions’ prey ends up in the hands of wolves, 10% of which are directly taken by wolves. In contrast, researchers have never recorded a case of a mountain lion stealing a wolf’s kill.
The worst victims are female cougars with cubs
Because under normal circumstances, a female cougars will hunt every 11 days, while a female cougars with cubs hunt every 6 to 7 days to feed their young, this hunting intensity is close to the limit and when it is robbed of its prey by wolves, both it and its cubs will starve.
Experts have found that in areas where wolves exist, cougars are often hungry and malnourished.
Similarly, in Yellowstone, in the years before and immediately after the reintroduction of wolves, experts have never found a starving mountain lion.
But 10 years after the introduction of wolves (after 2005), the local wolf population increased to a certain number, and experts began to frequently find starving cougars.
From 2005 to 2012, they recorded a total of 33 cases of cub deaths, of which 10 were due to starvation, accounting for 30%; At the same time, they recorded 45 adult and juvenile cougars deaths, of which 9 were due to starvation, accounting for 20%.
It can be seen that the wolf’s robbery behavior will make the mountain lion tired and hungry, which will eventually affect the survival of the mountain lion.
In December 1999, four years after the wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, experts recorded the first wolf kill of a mountain lion. Experts learned from the signals returned by the radio collar that four cubs of the cougar numbered F107 died one after another within five days.
They rushed to the scene and found the carcass of a red deer killed by F107. A few hundred meters away from the carcass, experts found the bodies of two cubs with separate signal collars.
Experts reconstructed the entire process of this series of murders through tracks in the snow and found that the mother cougar initially killed a red deer and called her cubs to eat it. Unexpectedly, the carcass attracted a pack of wolves called Druid. This pack had four adults at the time. The wolves surrounded the mother cougar and her cubs, the mother cougar was hungry and quickly took her cubs to escape. During the escape, she got separated from her cubs, and the two cubs were caught up by the wolves and killed on the spot.
Experts performed an autopsy on the cub and found that although the cub had almost no external injuries, the internal injuries were severe, with ruptured organs and a punctured stomach.
The second cougar kill in Yellowstone occurred in April 2003. Judging from the radio collar signal, female cougar F106 had been motionless for six hours, and Tony Ruth, a specialist in the Yellowstone cougar research project, determined that the cougar was definitely dead.
