Wolf Packs Claim Territories Like Countries on a Map, Study Shows

The debate on wolves has been going on since the dawn of man. The two apex predators have been either working together or competing to get food for thousands of years. The wolves that were loyal to man got easy food and became domesticated. The feral wolves stuck to hunting in packs for their food.

With wolf populations on the rise in Montana, management has become a huge debate. Montana hunters and ranchers watch as large packs of wolves decimate elk herds and livestock. Wolves that hunt like a special forces squad of warriors or a car full of Mafia members. Each pack has its neighborhood or territory that they hunt, and so do the surrounding packs.

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According to Voyagers Wolf Project

The Voyageurs Wolf Project is a University of Minnesota research project that was started to address one of the biggest knowledge gaps in wolf ecology—what do wolves do during the summer?  Our goal is to provide a comprehensive understanding of the summer ecology of wolves in the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem in northern Minnesota.

The Voyageur Wolf Project attached GPS collars to 16 wolves from 16 different packs. The GPS colors tracked their location over the course of an entire summer. The data shows that the wolves respected each other's "boundaries." Each pack designated a territory. Over the years the map began to look like a map of nations or tribes.

According to a post on the project's social media page

This likely is because the large lakes and other landscape features like rivers, roads, etc. seem to form natural territory edges that then ensure a similar territory configuration through time.