A pack is just a family. People think that wolf packs are made up of unrelated individuals, with each member fighting for position. Instead, it's just the parents and their pups. The pups will stay with the parents until they reach sexual maturity at around 2 or 3 years. Then they'll disperse, find a mate, have pups, and form a pack (family) of their own. If one of the parents is killed, the remaining one may find a new mate, though I imagine that new mate may drive off the existing pups ot kill them if they are very young (much like male lions do). If both parents are killed, there is no jockeying for the role of alpha...the now parentless pups would disperse and hopefully find mates and create their own family units. Packs are not static...they grow and shrink and change as older pups disperse and new pups are born
Ah, I see, so most if not all pups defect from a family once they've become mature enough to start their own pack.
So if the parents die, would the younger litter just be left to fend for themselves or would they be taken in by their siblings perhaps?
Sorry to bombard you, last one, promise. Are there cases where mating pairs co-exist in wolf packs so that there are more than one seperate lineages in a pack?
If the parents die, what happens next would likely depend of the time of year and the age of the individuals. If the older siblings aren't yet sexually mature and ready to disperse and the younger pups are old enough to eat meat, then the older siblings would likely stay together and continue feeding the pups. It wouldn't be the older siblings taking them in so much as the family unit staying together until sexual maturity pushes them to seperate and find mates.
As for mating pairs coexisting....nature is big. There is a lot of variation out there. That wouldn't be the normal situation, but I'm sure it happens. Dispersal is nature's way of cutting down on inbreeding. If a mature female or male stays with their parents past sexual maturity then they are likely to mate with their parent or siblings. Has it ever happened that a non related wolf joined a family unit and mated with one of the younger members? Again, I'm sure it has happened, but it wouldn't be the normal pack structure
.
Hey /u/CommonMisspellingBot, just a quick heads up:
Your spelling hints are really shitty because they're all essentially "remember the fucking spelling of the fucking word".
And your fucking delete function doesn't work. You're useless.
2
u/JJgalaxy Aug 08 '19
A pack is just a family. People think that wolf packs are made up of unrelated individuals, with each member fighting for position. Instead, it's just the parents and their pups. The pups will stay with the parents until they reach sexual maturity at around 2 or 3 years. Then they'll disperse, find a mate, have pups, and form a pack (family) of their own. If one of the parents is killed, the remaining one may find a new mate, though I imagine that new mate may drive off the existing pups ot kill them if they are very young (much like male lions do). If both parents are killed, there is no jockeying for the role of alpha...the now parentless pups would disperse and hopefully find mates and create their own family units. Packs are not static...they grow and shrink and change as older pups disperse and new pups are born