ELY, Minn. — Early one morning last week, before visitors arrived at the International Wolf Center in Ely, staff members released two small, black, fuzzy wolf pups into a fenced outdoor yard — the site of an unusual science experiment.
Propped up inside the pen stood a mirror, about 4 feet tall. The 3-month-old pups, named Cedar and Rowan, bounded over to it, yelping. They looked at their reflections, pawed and sniffed at the mirror, and walked around it, investigating.
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All the while, Matheus de Mesquita Silveira, a Brazilian researcher, stood quietly nearby, filming their every move.
“They are testing the mirror,” he later explained. “Like, ‘What’s going on? Can I cross? Can I not cross?’ ”
The pups were curious, but they were largely indifferent to the reflections of themselves they saw in the mirror. They didn’t exhibit any social reactions, such as fear or anxiety, by backing away or tucking their tails between their legs.
“So they do not invite the image to play with them, or show submission to the image. That shows us that they are not seeing that as another wolf,” Silveira said, adding that’s because wolves are never so indifferent to another wolf.
A philosopher by training, this is the third generation of pups at the Ely wolf center that Silveira has studied to see how they respond to their reflections.
There aren’t any wolves in Brazil, but he’s been fascinated by them ever since he was a kid when he saw a National Geographic documentary featuring scientist Dave Mech, who founded the International Wolf Center in 1985.
Silveira has been coming to Ely for the past decade as part of his work exploring wolves’ social cognition and behaviors.
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He’s one of two scientists working with the new pups this year. The other is Kathryn Lord, a researcher at the Chan Medical at the University of Massachusetts who studies the evolution and development of behavior in dogs and wolves.
One of the big differences between them is that wolves are “neophobic” — they’re fearful of anything new, and much more so than dogs. Lord believes that trait, along with other key behaviors that are formed when they are very young, could be linked to when they start walking. Wolves start walking a couple weeks earlier than dogs, before they can even see and hear.
Lord is trying to figure out precisely when that happens.
“Which sounds kind of easy, like, just look at them and see when they’re walking,” she said. But in reality, it’s much more difficult.
“We can’t just write down, ‘Cedar is walking today,’ ” Lord said. “Because we don’t know if he started walking that day, or he probably was doing it the night before or the day before, but we just didn’t see it.”
What they needed was a way to quantify it. So she worked with the International Wolf Center to outfit Cedar and Rowan with devices called accelerometers, devices that measure their movement, similar to what’s in a smart watch or a Fitbit. Then they attached them to tiny backpacks that the pups wore.
It’s difficult to find wolf pups to do this kind of research, Lord said.
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“We’re looking for places that are doing a really fantastic job, raising their pups, socializing their pups for living in captivity. And the International Wolf Center is one of the premier places,” she said.
In charge of that socialization at the Ely International Wolf Center is wolf curator Giselle Narváez Rivera. Her work begins when the wolf pups are still tiny, only about 10 days old. Rivera said she was with them when they first opened their eyes.
“And that first thing that they’ll see is us caring for them, bottle feeding. And so that relationship that they develop with us starts really young,” Rivera said.
In her two-and-a-half years at the wolf center, this was Rivera’s first time working with a newborn litter of pups.
“So it was pretty special to be there and see them howl for the first time,” she said.
They weighed only about a pound apiece at birth. Now, at about 3 months of age — which is toddlerhood for wolf pups — they weigh in at more than 30 pounds each.
Wolf Center staff stay with the pups around the clock. That’s partly to make sure they’re safe, but also to socialize them to humans before they integrate them into the center’s pack of adult wolves that’s on display for visitors.
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“If they go into the enclosure too young, we’re kind of going to miss that opportunity to bond with them, and they’re going to be more bonded to the wolves,” Rivera said.
That bond is important, she said, so the wolves will allow staff to monitor their health and well-being. For example, that morning, Rivera and other staff members pulled out a bunch of burrs stuck in the fur of Grayson, the dominant male in the pack.
“He trusts us. He let us do that. And that’s kind of part of that relationship building that we have with the wolves so we can care for them,” Rivera said.
But even after months of human socialization as pups, Lord said, they’re still wolves. They maintain all their natural hunting behaviors. So while they’re integrated with the pack, they will still need daily human contact to keep up that socialization.
The pups are scheduled to join the pack at the end of the month. And the adult wolves are ready for them. They already interact with the pups through the fence that divides them.
A female wolf has been regurgitating food for them to eat. Others check on them and cry to get their attention. Grayson, the dominant male, occasionally bares his teeth or snarls at them, letting them know where they fit in the social (or pecking) order.
“That's just him telling them, ‘Hey, calm down your energy. This is how we roll here.’ So that’s all very important communication that they are learning,” said Rivera.
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The pups were born in captivity at a similar facility in Wisconsin. Even though they aren’t related to the wolves at the center in Ely, the wolves here still produce a hormone in the spring called prolactin that makes the wolves want to nurture the pups and accept them into the pack.
That’s scheduled to happen very soon for Cedar and Rowan, at the end of July. At that point, data collection for the research will end. And their lives as ambassador wolves at the center will begin.
This story was originally published on MPRNews.org.
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