Life within the Pack

Objectives:

• To describe the structure of a wolf pack.
• To tell of the different roles within the wolf pack.
• To explain how gray wolves communicate with each other.
• To compare human families to a timber wolf pack.

Introduction: Stand in front of the class and without speaking demonstrate various feelings. Cross arms in front of the body, tap foot, etc. to show impatience. Ask children to guess your feeling. Discuss how they were able to tell how you were feeling. Explain that animals show how they are feeling by communicating with others through body language and sounds. Share with the class that wolves also communicate this way.

Lesson Focus: Wolves live in a family group called a pack. The size of this group can be just two wolves to sometimes as many at 20-30 wolves. Can you imagine living with that many people in your family? What would it be like? Discuss good points and bad points to living with a large group of people. If there were important decisions to be made, which caused disagreement and fighting within your family, how would the final decision be made? Who would take charge? Select children to share ideas.

The gray wolf pack has a special way of working together as a group. The alpha male and his partner, the alpha female are in charge of the pack. They are like parents. They raise the young pups, choose where to live, capture food and guard their territory. Last year's pups and other wolves help, but the alpha pair makes the decisions. How do you suppose the other wolves know who the leaders are? Stop for a moment to think about how our own families work. Discuss who makes the decisions at home and how this person(s) was/were chosen.

The alpha male and female are usually strong. They have a way of showing that they are important. How could they do this? Select a volunteer to look and act important without saying a word. Discuss his/her body language. The alpha pair walk and act proud. Their tails are high in the air, their ears are up and their fur is fluffed out. The other wolves keep their tails lower and never really look at the leaders. Whenever a wolf moves towards a more important wolf it will keep its body very low to the ground, its eyes down, its ears tucked back. Then it will lick the muzzle the mouth of the leader.

When you want to play with someone you have special ways of letting that person know. What do you do? Allow children to share or demonstrate their ideas. Wolves have their own way of asking other wolves to play. The wolf that wants to play will bow down in front of the wolf it wants to play with and wag its tail. Anyone who has a dog or has played with a dog has seen this happen. Sometimes the wolf will smile or grin and plan to show another wolf that it wants to play.

Activities:

• To reinforce the importance of nonverbal communication by people and wolves play two series of charades. In the first series use word cards to show how people show the various emotions. In the second series act out the words as a gray wolf would show the actions.
• Place children into groups of 4 to 6. Select one child to be the leader or the alpha male and female of the pack. Give a group a task to be completed non-verbally. The leader tries to communicate the task to his/her group. Some suggestions include: moving to a location in the room, beginning a hunt, playing, all lying down, hiding, capturing prey. etc. Discuss how each was able to show his/her group what was needed.

Objectives: Interaction. The student will understand that the interactions of matter and energy determine the nature of the environment.

Method: Determine the differences between the efficiency of energy use in a natural ecosystem and a maintained ecosystem.

Background: As energy flows through a food web, it is degraded and less of it is usable. An animal that uses more energy for reproduction than for metabolism is considered efficient. Energy efficiency in the abstract is a straightforward concept. It is a ratio of energy output to energy input. While there may be several definitions of energy efficiency we will be concerned with trophic-level efficiency, or the ratio of production of one trophic level to the production of the next lower trophic level.

Activity: 1. Compare the two examples of trophic level efficiency.

Sun	Trees	Moose	Wolves
1000kcal	100kcal	0.1kcal	0.001kcal

Sun	Corn	Cow	Human
1000kcal	100kcal	10kcal	1kcal

2. Answer the following questions:

1. Which of the two examples would you consider more efficient? Why?
2. Why does the wolf receive only .001 kcal compared to the human's 1kcal even though both pathways started with 1000 kcal?
3. Obviously, in a maintained ecosystem interaction has an effect on efficiency, but how?
4. There are several energy factors that are overloaded in the maintained ecosystem. If these factors were taken into consideration, the energy efficiency would be very different. Name four factors that are overloaded in the maintained ecosystem and describe the manner in which each affects the pathway. Which pathway would be more efficient if these factors could be figured into the problem?

Objective: Families will learn what a pack is and how packs form. They will learn about the social structure of the pack and learn the basic terms: pack, bide, disperse, alpha, subordinate.

Method: The families will divide into small groups of two or more. Through the game of tag, families will understand how packs form and how each individual attains status within the pack structure.

Background: Wolves live a family group called a pack where they run a very strict hierarchical structure. A pack can have two and up to 20-30 animals that include the alpha male and female who are the breeding pair and the leaders of the pack, the current year's litter of pups, the subordinate yearlings from the previous year and individuals that have come in from other packs. Subordinates, or non-breeding individuals, can attain alpha status by one of two ways:

1. by biding their time with their current pack; working their way up the hierarchical ladder
2. by dispersing; leaving their current pack and venturing out beyond their territory.

Activity:

• Discuss what a pack is and how the social structure of the pack works.
• Divide off by twos, threes, or more depending upon how many people are in the group. If there are a number of families, each can divide off together. There should be at least four separate groups.
• Groups should stand a considerable distance from one another, possibly in a large circle.
• One person is "it" and stands in the center of the circle. The main idea is to keep only a certain number of individuals in each group, let's say three. One person "disperses" to another group (could be any group), he/she runs to one of the other groups and tags someone in that group before the person who is "it" tags him/her (the person running). Once the individual disperses to a new group someone from that group will need to run to another group thus keeping the number of individuals the same in each group. Someone will always be chased. When the individual is tagged that person then becomes it.
• Continue the game until exhaustion sets in.
• Review any new activity words during the course of the game.

Discussion Questions:

1. Do you think packs have a limit as to the size they grow to?
2. What do you think are the risks of being a bider? A disperser?

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