A 50-year misunderstanding cleared.
Contrary to everything you’ve heard so far, in reality wolf packs don’t have alpha males and females. You see, a while ago, a researcher introduced this term to clear up what had happened many years ago, but thanks to pop culture and some money-hungry publishers the confusion still persists.
Most people believe that a wolf pack follows a strict hierarchy, with the alpha pair at the top, but the reality is much more family-oriented. In fact, when the photo below made rounds on the Internet, it appeared with a misleading caption, saying “Last is alone, the alpha. He controls everything from the rear. In that position, he can see everything and decide the direction. He sees all of the pack.”
But as wolf.org clarifies, the International Wolf Center does not even use the term alpha wolf anymore. The wolf in the back has simply fallen behind the rest of the group for unknown reasons, which are unrelated to status. The wolf may have just stopped to investigate something, or is compromised in some way, having trouble keeping up.
This is the actual BBC #FrozenPlanet caption; a reproductive female leading the powerful wolf pack from front!
Doesn’t fit the popular & false narrative of the male leading from behind, right?
Let’s see which tweet gets more traction#Leadership #FactOverFiction #CheckYourBiases https://t.co/nJ4L41HwXN pic.twitter.com/KoEuPdqkQn— Harriette Van Spall, MD MPH (@hvanspall) January 4, 2022
In reality, the majority of wild wolf packs consist of the two parents and their offspring, including older pups that have not yet left the natal pack. Since they are the parents, the adult wolves are in charge of the pack. Simple as that.
In fact, the term “alpha” is outdated and implies that there is some sort of fight to be the leader, which is just not the case, as packs tend to be led by wolves who have bred and had pups. That said, some packs do have more than one breeding wolf, and in these cases the term “dominant daughter” or “subordinate breeder” is used by scientists.
“Just because wolf packs are a familial unit does not mean there is not fierce competition between individuals in the pack from time to time,” Thomas Gable, project lead of the Voyageurs Wolf Project, who previously used GPS tracking to show how much wolf packs avoid each other’s range, told IFLScience.
“For a while, there was a big emphasis on the hierarchy within a pack which has been replaced, to an extent, with the idea that packs are largely familial units. But I think it is easy to go too far the other way and think of wolf packs as a nice happy family where everyone gets along,” he added. “And certainly that can be the case, but there also is fierce competition between pack mates for resources and wolves often disperse from or leave their packs, likely due, in part, to competition for food or other resources with their pack mates.”
The term “alpha male” got into mainstream thought due to some research done on wolf behavior in captivity. It is important to remember though that in captivity, wolves tend to behave very differently from what they do in naturally formed family packs in the wild.
Anyway, it was Rudolf Schenkel, an animal behaviorist, who first wrote about captive wolves in 1947, after observing 10 wolves kept in a 10×20-meter (33×66 ft) space at Basel Zoo in Switzerland. In that limited space, the highest-ranking male and female formed a pair, but the hierarchy was prone to change. He also noted that in wild wolf packs might be led by the parents of the rest of those constituting the pack, but apparently this information was overlooked at the time.
Ultimately, however, it was Schenkel’s work that gave rise to the term “alpha wolf”. “By continuously controlling and suppressing all types of competition within the same sex, both ‘alpha animals’ defend their social position,” he wrote.
In the 1960s and 1970s, more research was done on wolves, but again, almost exclusively on ones in captivity. Dr L. David Mech, a scientist and wolf researcher, wrote a book that became a hit and helped to popularize the alpha concept. But even Mech himself said later that the information in the book is outdated, including the idea of an alpha male.
Mech then spent many summers studying wild wolves on Ellesmere Island, Canada, in hope of correcting the misunderstanding surrounding wolf social hierarchy he enticed. After a while, the pack observed acclimatized to his presence, allowing him to study them from a close range. He then observed that the alpha pair were simply the parents of the rest of the pack, and while the young were submissive to the parents, dominance fights were few and far between.
“[I]n natural wolf packs, the alpha male and female are merely the breeding animals, the parents of the pack, and dominance contests with other wolves are rare, if they exist at all,” Mech wrote in an article. “During my 13 summers observing the Ellesmere Island pack, I saw none.”
Young wolves in the wild leave their original packs to find opposite-sex partners to breed with and form new packs. Once bonded, wolf pairs are highly monogamous, hardly changing partners unless one of them dies. The pack is dominated by the male and female, who, being the parents of the rest of the group, decide who eats first. And wild male offspring simply don’t fight with their fathers for alpha male status.
So, to be the leader of the pack, there is no great dominance fight to the top. You simply find your mate and start your own pack. The “alpha male” is just a misunderstanding.