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I saw this on Facebook. Is it true?

Photograph showing a wolf pack marching through snow, posted by Gary Moss on 'February 8 at 5:11 pm', with the text mentioned below

pretty cool
A pack (wolves): The first 3 are the older or sick and they set the pace of the group. If it was on the contrary, they would be left behind and lost contact with the pack. In ambush case they would be sacrificed.
The following are the 5 strongest. In the center follow the remaining members of the pack, and at the end of the group follow the other 5 stronger.
Last, alone, follows the alpha wolf. It controls everything from the rear.
That position can control the whole group, decide the direction to follow and anticipate the attacks of opponents. The pack follows the rhythm of the elders and the head of the command that imposes the spirit of mutual help not leaving anyone behind.

unor
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dwjohnston
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    The author of this has apparently never broken trail through snow. That's a LOT harder than following a broken, packed trail. – jamesqf Feb 21 '16 at 06:19
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    Don't you just love people writing authoritatively about something they know nothing about it? :-) – T.J. Crowder Feb 21 '16 at 12:35
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    How do people just make this crap up? – Insane Feb 22 '16 at 01:20
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    @Insane - Because it has a feel good moral. Some people when called out that it's not truthful, will even reply 'That doesn't matter! It's the story that matters!'. – dwjohnston Feb 22 '16 at 01:28
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    @dwjohnston Maybe I should take up blatant-misleading-info-graphic-writing as a hobby. – Insane Feb 22 '16 at 01:29
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    That's what the Italian proverb [se non è vero, è ben trovato](https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/se_non_%C3%A8_vero,_%C3%A8_ben_trovato) is for. – gerrit Feb 22 '16 at 11:58
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    @Insane Plot twist; OP is Gary Moss trying to test whether or not people can call BS on his "work" so that he can have free reign in making more craptacular crappo-graphics. – MonkeyZeus Feb 22 '16 at 16:08
  • Winds up the description of what is going on with the pack is pretty much made up. – PoloHoleSet Sep 13 '16 at 17:05

2 Answers2

61

No, the pack is led by the alpha (breeding) females.

The picture is taken from the BBC 2011 documentary Frozen Planet. This Guardian article which features pictures from the documentary describes the picture as:

A massive pack of 25 timberwolves hunting bison on the Arctic circle in northern Canada. In mid-winter in Wood Buffalo National Park temperatures hover around -40C. The wolf pack, led by the alpha female, travel single-file through the deep snow to save energy. The size of the pack is a sign of how rich their prey base is during winter when the bison are more restricted by poor feeding and deep snow. The wolf packs in this National Park are the only wolves in the world that specialise in hunting bison ten times their size. They have grown to be the largest and most powerful wolves on earth

emphasis by me

Snopes has an article on the picture which also include the history of the post, and also a note about the use of the term "alpha" for wolf packs.

SIMEL
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    -1 because your sources don't support your interpretation. Your interpretation is that "the pack is led by the alpha (breeding) females," but you linked to the snopes.com article, which explains that alphas don't actually exist. –  Feb 21 '16 at 17:07
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    "wolves [...] that specialise in hunting bison ten times their size" I'm confused by this statement in the quotes. The typical mass of a bison is about 900kg (with some up to 1200kg), whereas the typical mass of a wolf is around 45kg. If a bison is only ten times the size of a wolf, that's either an unusally small bison (it would make sense if they were going after juveniles, I suppose) or a scarily large wolf. – David Richerby Feb 21 '16 at 21:59
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    @DavidRicherby: Adult timber wolves grow up to 79kg - so yes, they're scarily large wolves but still only around 8% of a bison's mass rather than 10%. – slebetman Feb 22 '16 at 03:37
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    @slebetman That figure of 79kg is the largest wolf ever found in North America, so isn't a representative number. [Wikipedia](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northwestern_wolf#Description) says that male timber wolves average 48kg in BC and 40kg in Yukon. – David Richerby Feb 22 '16 at 04:10
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    @BenCrowell The Snopes article merely says the term alpha exists only in the same sense human parents are alpha over their children. It's not so much wrong as it is misleading. – Insane Feb 22 '16 at 09:15
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    @BenCrowell, a. Does the answer refute the claim? Yes it does, regardless of whether the concept of "alpha" wolves exists or not, the pack is not led by the elders, but by some of the strongest females in the pack. b. Snopes doesn't say that alpha wolves don't exist, but that the term breeding is better to describe them, which is the reason I added "(breeding)" in the first line. c. A BBC documentery is not a scientific paper, and it's reasenable for them too use popular terms, like alpha, even if they are not accurate, or even outdated. – SIMEL Feb 22 '16 at 09:45
  • @DavidRicherby, [Here is a video](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tCG1I-Ssgww&ab_channel=PBS) by PBS showing wolves hunting bisons. In the footage they say that they are looking for the younger or weaker individuals, they also show how a single wolf is able to stop a 1 year old calf, while another, younger, wolf loses to a larger bison. I don't know why they have an inconsistency with the numbers, but there is proof that wolves do hunt bisons. – SIMEL May 17 '17 at 06:49
  • @David Richerby Mass does not equal size. If they wanted to imply that, then it would have said "10 times their weight." or something like that. – Zimano May 18 '17 at 21:03
  • @Zimano An animal ten times the mass will have pretty close to ten times the volume, so "ten times the size" and "ten times the weight" are pretty much the same thing. – David Richerby May 18 '17 at 21:05
  • @David Richerby Print and cut out a true scale picture of 1 bison and 10 wolves. Place the wolves over the bison. Mass is not volume. – Zimano May 18 '17 at 21:08
  • @Zimano Dealing with cut-outs would be showing that mass is not projected surface area. I certainly agree with that. – David Richerby May 18 '17 at 21:14
  • @David Richerby Oh come on, David; you know what I meant. – Zimano May 18 '17 at 21:19
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The screenshot included in the question contains a block of text with a long interpretation by someone named Gary Moss. Moss's interpretation is that packs of wolves have alpha animals, which go in back, while older, weaker animals go in front. Supposedly the alphas "control the whole group" from behind.

The whole concept that a wolf pack is led by an alpha animal turns out to be incorrect. The alpha concept was based on studies of animals kept in cages, where they don't behave normally. It was debunked in a 1999 paper by L. David Mech. Here is the abstract of the paper:

The prevailing view of a wolf (Canis lupus) pack is that of a group of individuals ever vying for dominance but held in check by the "alpha" pair, the alpha male and the alpha female. Most research on the social dynamics of wolf packs, however, has been conducted on non-natural assortments of captive wolves. Here I describe the wolf-pack social order as it occurs in nature, discuss the alpha concept and social dominance and submission, and present data on the precise relationships among members in free-living packs based on a literature review and 13 summers of observations of wolves on Ellesmere Island, Northwest Territories, Canada. I conclude that the typical wolf pack is a family, with the adult parents guiding the activities of the group in a division-of-labor system in which the female predominates primarily in such activities as pup care and defense and the male primarily during foraging and food-provisioning and the travels associated with them.

Mech, L. David. 1999. Alpha status, dominance, and division of labor in wolf packs. Canadian Journal of Zoology 77:1196-1203. Jamestown, ND: Northern Prairie Wildlife Research Center

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    This is really a response to another answer and not an answer to the question. – DJClayworth Feb 21 '16 at 19:13
  • @kundor: Thanks for pointing that out. I'll edit my answer accordingly. –  Feb 21 '16 at 19:39
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    @DJClayworth: The material about alpha animals is in the original question, not just in Ilya Melamed's answer. –  Feb 21 '16 at 19:45
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    The abstract itself is not enough to suggest the Mech paper "debunks" the alpha-pair theory. – Daron Feb 21 '16 at 23:57
  • Is the concept of "alpha" as the layman knows it, applicable to any animals then? Primate groups, etc.? – HC_ Feb 22 '16 at 23:26
  • If Mech's findings indicated the alpha-wolf model was inaccurate, he would have said that outright. Read the abstract more carefully. It suggests things are more nuanced than the layman would assume but never says "there is no such thing as an alpha pair" – Daron Feb 23 '16 at 11:08
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    @HC The presence of an "alpha-male" is much easier to determine in animals such as gorillas where breeding males are physically different from non-breeding males. However the standard view on such cases is that the alpha male is not exactly the leader of the group. They are "in charge of" keeping away other breeding males but not in charge of where the troop goes next etcetera. – Daron Feb 23 '16 at 11:26