Een alfawolf is de enige die jongen krijgt.
Volgens mij is dit een fabeltje, of in ieder geval overdreven.
Ik citeer uit Mech. Chapter IV Reproduction and family life.
"Courtship and mating
The mating urge does not occur in wolves until they are about twenty-two months old. R. A. Rausch (1967a), of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, examined the reproductive tracts of 246 female Alaskan wolves approximaately ten months old during the mating season and found no sign of sexual maturity. most of the twenty-two-month-old females (170) that he checked, however were pregnant. Males are fertile when twenty-two months old."
[...]
"Dominance order in relation to mating.
Dominance order, mate preference, and the number of successful coourtships are closely interrelated. According to Schenkel (1947), the alpha pair, or top-ranking male and female, are the only members of a pack to mate. However, apparently he believed that most packs contain only a single mature pair, in which case, these animals
have to be the only ones to mate.
However, many packs include several mature wolves (Chapter II) Murie (1944) studied such a pach and concluded that the alpha male was not the father of the pups. in the Brookfield Zoo pack the alpha male was sexually one of the least active animals. During four seasons a particular alpha male was only once seen mating (Ginsburg, 1965). When this individual was removed ffrom the pack, the second-ranking ("beta") male became dominant, and his sexual activity then decreased markedly (Rabb et al., 1967).
Although the alpha male may not contribute to a pack's reproduction except when the ack is first established (Chapter III), the alpha female is very important. For five years, the original alpha female in the Brookfield Zoo kept her dominant position and each year produced the only litter born to the pack, even though the grooup also included at least two other mature females each year. In the two years after the alpha female died, however, the trend broke down. During the first year, the new alpha female bore the young, but the next year she was the only one of four females that did not produce a litter."
Het heeft dus wel met hierarchie te maken, maar het is zeker niet sluitend. Het is niet altijd zo dat de alphateef degene is die een nest krijgt. Soms is het andersom, soms krijgen meerdere woolven een nest in 1 roedel. jammer genoeg geeft Mech geen duidelijke info over data bij wilde wolven. Maar ik denk dat het eerste stukje ook wel voor zich spreekt. Bijna alle (170) teven van 22 maanden waren drachtig! En ik denk niet dat ze in Alaska 170 roedels hebben opgezocht en daar elke keer de alpha teef van onderzocht hebben.