The footage, shared on the MalaMala Game Reserve YouTube page, shows a lioness slinking through a riverbed, her sights set on a herd of impala grazing nearby. However, she's not the only one interested in the potential quarry. A leopard, seemingly unaware of her rival predator, is targeting the same herd.

A group of tourists watching from a nearby vehicle can only guess at which predator might come out on top. The leopard appears only half committed to the hunt and breaks cover. As the impalas sound the alarm, it triggers a frantic chase. A second lioness sprints in from the sidelines to capitalise on the chaos and successfully brings down one of the herd members, leaving the leopard looking on from a rock on the river bank.

Realising that the hunt had gone the way of the lions, the leopard wisely retreats to the safety of a nearby tree to wait it out. 

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“We witnessed an incredible and rare event yesterday as multiple pods of orcas successfully hunted a blue whale in Bremer Canyon,” Naturaliste Charters posted to Facebook. “The intense ordeal lasted less than 40 minutes from when we first saw the blue at the surface to when the battle was over.”

Offshore from Bremer Bay, the submarine Bremer Canyon is part of a regional network of underwater chasms—the Albany Canyons—gouged in the continental shelf and slope between Cape Leeuwin and the Esperance area. Funneling nutrient-rich Southern Ocean currents, the shelf-incising Bremer Canyon is a hotspot of biological productivity and diversity—and, in summer and fall, host to the greatest seasonal gathering of orcas documented in the Southern Hemisphere.

While the several hundred orcas hunting here commonly target such prey as beaked whales, tuna, and squid, pygmy blue whales—part of a rejuvenating Indian Ocean stock—sometimes land on the menu, as multiple Bremer Canyon predation events in recent years attests.

While pygmy blues are the smallest of the four blue-whale subspecies, they’re still enormous animals, reaching lengths of some 24 metres (79 feet). The victim in this most recent event was reckoned at 18 metres (59 feet). In 2021, Naturaliste Charters photographed some 50 to 70 orcas over Bremer Canyon kill an estimated 16-metre (52-foot) blue whale after an hours-long attack. And as Ian Dickinson wrote about here at Earth Touch News, Bremer Canyon orcas killed two pygmy blues—one of them 20 metres (66 feet) long—in the space of a couple of weeks in 2019.

These ambitious attacks on pygmy blues involve dozens of orcas, which, among other areas of the blue’s body, commonly target the jaws—the tongue apparently being a prized delicacy.

It’s unclear the degree to which orcas might attempt to kill a full-grown blue whale of the larger subspecies, which are the biggest of all beasts: Antarctic blues may exceed 30 metres (100 feet) and weigh 180 metric tons. In 2017, drone footage captured a pod of orcas charging an adult blue in California’s Monterey Bay, but this didn’t appear to be a serious predatory attempt, and the blue speedily exited the scene.

Indeed, except in the case of the small minke whale, successful orca strikes on mature baleen whales haven’t been documented very often. Patterns of rake marks seen on baleen species suggest most are primarily vulnerable to killer whales as calves or juveniles.

But given some populations and ecotypes of orcas commonly hunt whale calves—and may opportunistically make a go at older individuals—the threat of killer-whale predation likely helps shape the lifeways of baleen whales. In response to that threat, these ocean giants tend to follow either a “fight” or “flight” strategy.

Earlier this year, a study published in Marine Mammal Science showed that most whale species that customarily flee from orcas—which include blue whales as well as such close cousins as the fin, sei, Bryde’s, and minke—sing at a frequency too low to be detected at distance by killer whales: an example, perhaps, of “acoustic crypsis,” allowing these rorquals to communicate with one another without advertising themselves to their primary predator.

By contrast, baleen-whale species that fight back against orcas—among them humpbacks, bowheads, grey whales, and right whales—generally sing at higher frequencies above 1,500 Hz, clearly audible to killer whales. These offence-makes-the-best-defence species also tend to be slower and more manoeuvrable than their “flight” counterparts, which are slender, streamlined, and impressively nimble.

The study also notes that the “fight” species usually give birth, and frequently migrate, in coastal waters—relatively shallow nearshore environments where they can often stage successful group defence against persecuting orcas—whereas the “flight” types often breed and travel out in the open ocean. That deep, bluewater realm may improve their ability to outpace killer whales.

In a University of Washington press release about the research, faculty member and study author Trevor Branch said, “It just never occurred to me that some whales sing low to avoid killer whales, but the more I looked at this, the more I realized that every aspect of their behavior is influenced by the fear of predation.”

Top header image: timnutt, Flickr

An example of the diverse scavenging guild that can attend even smallish roadkill comes courtesy of a recent video compilation from northwestern Montana, USA. Posted by Janet Pesaturo of Winterberry Wildlife, the camera-trap footage shows the breakdown of a road-killed wild turkey:

After a weasel and especially some ravens work most of the carcass over, a striped skunk drags the measly remnants—mostly bones, gristle, and feathers, from the looks of it—into a hollow log Pesaturo notes in her post is a regular nap station for a puma.

In the footage compilation, other scavengers at the lean feast include a red fox and a bobcat, shown separately pilfering some of the scraps. Meanwhile, the burly puma commuting to its resting log appears to do little more than sniff at the dinner table. (We’ve written before here about the rich assortment of scavengers that capitalize on puma kills, incidentally.)

Striped skunks—which range throughout all of Montana, and indeed most of North America from southern Canada to northern Mexico—are omnivores with a strongly meat- and invertebrate-leaning diet, and they certainly happily tuck into carrion. This particular skunk’s decision to cache the turkey remnants inside a nook presumably redolent with puma aroma might seem surprising, as skunks definitely sometimes land on mountain-lion menus. But the infamous musk that skunks spray in defence gives them some swagger around bigger carnivores; as we’ve posted about in the past, striped and spotted skunks have been observed bullying and defending carcasses from pumas, despite the epic size difference.

(Perhaps the best-known eater of skunks in North America is the great horned owl, nests of which are sometimes drenched in skunk-musk perfumery. This footage shows a nighttime horned-owl attack on a striped skunk—though be forewarned it’s rather graphic.)

The turkey-scavenging footage also highlights the significance of roadkill as a wildlife-mortality factor. Montana is among the leading states when it comes to the number of wildlife-vehicle collisions per capita (as well as fatalities from such crashes), which is partly a reflection of the state’s abundance and wide distribution of wild animals, including plenty of large-bodied critters such as deer, elk, moose, pronghorn, and bears.

While road-killed ungulates are a regular sight in much of Montana (and elsewhere in North America) and much attention is rightfully paid to the danger highway-crossings pose in some areas to rare carnivores such as grizzlies, the (literal) impact of vehicles on birdlife is sometimes overlooked. As large birds that spend most of their time (and nest) on the ground—and which regularly file along and across roadways—wild turkeys are among the avifaunal groups most at risk of vehicle strikes. So are scavenging birds such as raptors and corvids drawn to roadkill, fruit-eaters winging among roadside plantings, and certain songbirds for whom de-icing and anti-slip treatments such as road salts and sand can be (toxic) attractants, among others.

Special wildlife-crossing structures such as overpasses and underpasses are one way to help critters following tried-and-true foraging routes and migratory corridors safely traverse roads, and indeed wild turkeys have been observed using them. Fencing, diversion poles, animal-crossing warning signs, and removing wildlife attractants along highway corridors are other examples of roadkill-mitigation efforts.

(And on that note, a closing PSA: Slow down and stay alert out on the blacktop!)

Top header image: Alan Krakauer/Flickr

These dramatic moments, captured on camera, spotlight a surprising truth: Seabirds, waterfowls, and other feathered folk often find themselves on the wrong end of the aquatic food chain, contending with underwater predators that range from orcas and crocs to sharks, seals, otters, and even bony fish.

How often do birds end up on the menu of underwater predators such as orcas and crocs? Well, in a word, frequently. In freshwater realms, everything from bullfrogs and large fish such as pike and catfish (at least one species of which will actually wriggle ashore to snag pigeons) to otters (Exhibit A, Exhibit B) and, yes, crocodilians will take birds opportunistically. (Though relationships can be complicated: Wading birds often nest in alligator-patrolled swamps and marshes—losing fallen nestlings to the reptiles, sure, but also benefiting from the built-in protection they provide from nest-raiding predators such as raccoons.)

And how about those seabirds, waterfowl, and other avian clans that spend time along seacoasts and far out over the briny bluewater of the open ocean? We’ll acknowledge off the bat that penguins—the world’s sole remaining flightless seabirds—are eaten (or at least torpedoed in target practice) by an array of marine hunters, including various pinnipeds, sharks, and orcas. Here we’ll mostly focus on flying birds, which would seem generally less vulnerable to toothy underwater beasts.

Crocodilians & Seabirds

The Tárcoles River croc’s pelican lunch wasn’t really atypical. American crocodiles in Costa Rica have been observed—and caught on camera (multiple times)—feeding on brown pelicans before. An American croc on the mangrove coast of southwestern Florida was filmed making an unsuccessful strike on a pelican in 2019. (Indeed, not just in ocean surf and estuarine lagoons but also inland freshwaters, a variety of crocodilians, from Nile crocs to American alligators, will dine on pelican at any opportunity.)

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And any number of other seabirds may be taken by croc species tolerant of brackish and saltwater, such as American and estuarine crocodiles. American crocs will prey on cormorants around atolls and cays in Belize, for example. And last year, in a particularly unusual sighting, an estuarine croc snatched a pomarine jaeger—a feisty seabird that summers in the Arctic and winters out at sea—on a beach on Pelican Island in the northern Great Barrier Reef of Australia.

“We believe it is the first recorded meeting between an estuarine crocodile and a pomarine jaeger,” Queensland Department of Environment, Science & Innovation Senior Ranger Lee Hess said in a news release, “and unfortunately it was a long way to fly to end up like this.”

Orca "Games"

Circling back to the grebe-gobbling orca in Seattle, this isn’t the first time, by any means, that killer whales have been recorded seizing or otherwise messing with seabirds and waterfowl. That includes in the Salish Sea, where transient orcas chase, grab, and slap not just grebes but also common murres, marbled murrelets, scoters, common loons, rhinoceros auklets, mergansers, and brant geese, to name a few avian victims. These interactions, unwelcome and frequently fatal as they are for the birds involved, often (and maybe even mostly) appear to be non-predatory or at least non-consumptive. The whales—frequently juveniles—seem to essentially be playing with the birds, though of course this play can help a young transient orca hone its hunting chops for future goes after pinnipeds and other sea-mammals.

 Among numerous other corners of the world where similar apparent play has been recorded, a study written up in a 1990 Marine Ornithology paper documented orcas harassing many Cape and bank cormorants off the coast of southern Africa. The typical routine “involved a whale approaching from behind a seabird swimming on the surface, taking the bird in its mouth, diving with it, and then leaving the dead or dying bird floating on the surface,” the authors wrote, noting that “few if any” of the killed birds were actually eaten.

The study, which discussed fieldwork done in 1986, noted that across four days in April of that year a pair of orcas were estimated to have killed nearly 300 young cormorants. “In December between seven and 24 adult cormorants were taken per day,” the paper explained. “and in that month the whales preyed upon Cape fur seals in the early morning and late afternoon and ‘played’ with seabirds throughout the day.”

It should be noted that orcas have been observed actually feeding on (and not just roughhousing with) birds besides penguins, among them gannets, petrels, kittiwakes, guillemots, puffins, and eider ducks.

And it should also be noted that numerous kinds of seabird—from storm-petrels and kelp gulls to southern giant petrels and various albatrosses—will trail orcas in hopes of scavenging from their kills. Taken as a whole, the orca/seabird ledger probably shakes out in the positive for the birds, given all the fishy and blubbery scraps that killer-whale noshing produces.

Bird-Munching Mammals

What about other marine mammals? Besides hunting penguins in some areas—let us pause and acknowledge that living, breathing penguin nightmare called the leopard seal—pinnipeds can be proficient predators of seabirds. Cape fur seals, for example, may be significant mortality factors for fledgling cormorants and gannets in the waters of southern Africa. Indeed, capable of exploiting varied and novel food sources and mastering new predatory techniques, pinnipeds can rack up quite the avifaunal kill-count in local areas. One hungry walrus along Coats Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago, for instance, appeared to successfully hunt 67 thick-billed murres in the course of one August day in 2002 (with its preferred feeding method being snorfling out the birds’ soft tissues and leaving the inside-out skin and skeleton). And some of this bird-hunting can take place on land: A single male New Zealand sea lion was recorded killing at least 128 nesting adult royal albatrosses on sub-Antarctic Campbell Island in January 2005, with an average daily predation rate of seven birds over the course of a number of weeks.

Even sea otters, mostly known for crunching invertebrates such as sea urchins and mollusks (oh, and melting hearts via floating naps: you’re welcome), have been known to prey on seabirds here and there, including western grebes, gulls, common loons, cormorants, and surf scoters. Less surprising is the fact that North American river otters making their living in coastal marine environments can be adept predators of seabirds such as storm-petrels and gulls—even brown pelicans.

Shark Bites

Meanwhile, piscivory is one of the go-to dietary niches for birds, but what about the other way around? All sorts of sharks will snatch a floating or diving bird if they can, it probably goes without saying. Baitballs, floating carrion, and other common food sources regularly draw pelagic birds and sharks into close proximity. And young seabirds still mastering flight can be, if you will, sitting ducks for sharks. Fledgling albatrosses learning the ropes in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands certainly face a steep learning curve on account of tiger sharks, which seasonally beeline to atoll rookeries to hunt them.

An early 19th-century scientific report about the hunting style of the common thresher shark alleged a thresher in Dublin Bay tail-whipped a wounded diver (loon) and then consumed the bird. (Although that account faced skepticism, modern research shows threshers do indeed stun fish with their resplendently long upper caudal fins, and seabirds are considered probable menu items for the species.)

Great white sharks—occasional biters, if maybe not regular eaters, of penguins off southern Africa—are, like orcas, probably mostly a boon for seabirds as a reliable source of spoils. That said, scavenging seabirds might sometimes end up inadvertently in the crosshairs of a feeding great white. Researchers observing interactions between a white shark and seabirds attending to a fur-seal carcass in the Tasman Sea noted that larger birds—albatrosses and northern giant petrels—bobbed in the vicinity and did periodic flyovers of the shark-shadowed carcass, but didn’t actively feed. Citing similar behaviour among big-bodied seabirds elsewhere, they concluded perhaps those albatrosses and giant petrels fretted about getting targeted by the great white, whereas littler seabirds at the smorgasbord, including fairy trions and white-faced storm petrels—which showed less discretion dining as they did close to the shark—may have felt less threatened.

It’s not only seabirds and waterfowl that can end up sharkbait: Migrating songbirds making open-water crossings are vulnerable if, as often happens, exhaustion, injury, bad weather, or disorientation forces them into the drink. Dead or still alive, such doomed, waterlogged migrants become easy pickings. A 2019 study showed tiger sharks in the Gulf of Mexico swallowed a variety of migrating land birds, from barn swallows to yellow-bellied sapsuckers; the research even raised the possibility that a well-documented tiger-shark nursery in the northern Gulf might be situated and timed to allow baby sharks to feast on bird fallout there during the autumn migration.

Researchers inventorying the stomachs of Mediterranean blue sharks have found such land birds as common swifts, quail, pigeons, and mockingbirds (also swallowed by a Pacific blue shark off Baja California)—presumably eaten as migration fallout—as well as various seabirds. Even typically deepwater sharks get in on the action: In the same sea, blackmouth catsharks—which rise from the depths at night to forage closer to the surface—have been found with blackbirds and warblers inside of them.

Fish Food

Various bony fish will also eat birds if given the chance: by scavenging, of course, but also sometimes via active predation—or perhaps unintentional predation, as may have been the case with the Cory’s shearwater found in the stomach of an Atlantic bluefin tuna, which conceivably might have ingested the bird accidentally when both were going after baitfish.

A stomach-content analysis of Pacific cod off Alaska’s Aleutian Islands suggest those fish consume a decent share of seabirds such as auklets and murres, though it’s not clear how much of that comes from predation vs. seafloor-scavenging.

Another surprising bird-eater is the American monkfish or goosefish: A 2013 study showed that this bottom-dwelling ambush predator, also known as the “all-mouth” for its gaping maw, will eat the little auks called dovekies over the deeps of the Northwest Atlantic. The researchers suspect this predation likely occurs opportunistically when monkfish swimming in the water column—when migrating, for example—run into diving dovekies.

Eight-Armed Bird-Eaters

Speaking of unexpected aquatic bird predators, let’s end here: While cephalopods are usually on the losing end of avian encounters—squid are, needless to say, a big-time food source for many seabirds—remember that those brainy, always-scheming octopuses sometimes unleash their tentacles upon feathered quarry.

Top header image: timnutt, Flickr

When these relatively small (and, c’mon, full-on adorable) seals haul out on beaches, tidal mudflats, and nearshore rock stacks, though, they also fall under the radar of land-based meat-eaters. A new study published in Ecology shows that the yippy, yappy “songdog” of the Americas, the coyote, can be an effective predator of harbour seals—the smallest of them, at least.

The insights come from California’s North Coast, where, beginning back in 2016 and 2017, researchers surveying the harbour-seal colony at MacKerricher State Park noted carcasses of seal pups that had apparently been dragged away from the swash into the dunes. More dead pups in similar locations and conditions—most with skulls detached or entirely missing—turned up in the following years.

Tracks, scat, and bite marks suggestive of a canid attack all pointed to coyotes as the likely culprits—a suspicion confirmed last year when camera traps documented the songdogs in action tugging seal pups into the dunes. (And here’s our obligatory “circle-of-life” acknowledgment: Nobody likes seeing a baby seal taken out, but predation is just part of the game here on Planet Earth, and a reality of harbour-seal existence since forever. Also: Harbour seals can be plenty bitey themselves.)

Between the numerous carcasses and the camera-trap images, the study authors attribute the loss of some 55 seal pups at the MacKerricher rookery since 2016 to coyotes—and noted that a varied guild of scavengers, from rodents to gulls, ravens, and bald eagles, profited from the spoils.

The study suggests that seal pups less than a couple of weeks old—i.e., the littlest and most defenseless around—are the main ones these beachgoing coyotes target. That’s not particularly surprising, as harbour seals quickly grow heftier than your average western coyote (typically lighter and slighter than the burly “eastern coyote” or “coywolf” of eastern North America).

The researchers also cast their investigative nets more widely and collected documentation of coyote predation on seal pups in other stretches of California’s Pacific coast, home to one of more than a dozen harbour-seal stocks in the U.S. This included direct observations and photographs of coyotes ambushing pups in the Drakes Estero and Bolinas Lagoon rookeries farther south in Marin County. There, a single coyote or pair would rush upon “hauled-out harbour seals at the edge of exposed intertidal sandbars within coastal lagoons,” sending adults and pups alike scrambling for the water. Amid the chaos, coyotes would snatch pups onshore or even out in the shallows.

At MacKerricher State Park, coyotes appeared to preferentially feed on the energy-rich brain tissue of killed pups—hence the detached or missing skulls noted in the majority of seal carcasses found in dune vegetation. Interestingly, a similar zombie-ish taste has been noted in brown hyenas that prey on young Cape fur seals along Namibian and South African beaches, the favored brain material providing not only a high-calorie hit but also perhaps a moisture source for the shaggy “strandwolf” in such arid coastlands as the Namib Desert’s seashores.

Though coyotes undoubtedly primarily relish marine mammals in the form of carrion, they have been documented actively hunting them before, including harbour-seal pups farther north along the U.S. West Coast in Washington State as well as sea otters in Alaska. A particularly interesting case from Cape Cod, Massachusetts showed that the canids—at least eastern coyotes, anyway—can sometimes dispatch not just pups, but older and larger pinnipeds: In the winter of 2002, a coyote on that North Atlantic peninsula’s Nauset Beach was seen killing a good-sized yearling or adult harp seal larger than itself, being dragged about by its prey in the process. Analysis of the seal carcass showed the coyote had latched onto the throat of the seal and, in the only visible wound, “efficiently severed its jugular vein.”

Meanwhile, coyotes and brown hyenas aren’t the only terrestrial carnivores known to hunt seals and other marine life. The polar bear, of course, is best-known for this behaviour, but, then again, it’s as much a marine carnivore as a terrestrial one. But brown bears, too, for example, have been documented preying on harbour seals and sea otters in coastal Alaska. African lions of the Namib Desert pounce on hauled-out Cape fur seals (and also snack on such exotic fare as cormorants and flamingos, not to mention beached whales). Jaguars in multiple corners of the coastal Neotropics dispatch nesting sea turtles (as big as leatherbacks). And a recent study shows pumas in Patagonia can be highly effective predators of Magellanic penguins—and that local extirpation of the large cats by sheep farmers in the past may have allowed penguin colonies to establish on accessible mainland seashores once too vulnerable to puma predation.

Indeed, the spectre of raids by land-based predators has surely influenced the geography of pinniped (and seabird) rookeries and haul-outs since time immemorial. The new paper on seal-pup predation at MacKerricher State Park suggests harbour seals there may be increasingly favoring intertidal rocks over formerly more heavily used mainland beachfront as haul-outs, possibly (though not definitively) in response to the threat of coyotes.

And other canids besides the American songdog will set their sights on marine mammals. Arctic foxes burrow into the snowy sea-ice lairs of ringed seals to prey on pups, which have also been killed by red foxes. Although they are more liable to scavenge hyena-killed carcasses, Cape black-backed jackals in southern Africa sometimes try tackling live seal pups as well—a task made easier when groups of these small wild dogs cooperate, one throttling the pup while others tug at flippers and other parts of the body.

The grey wolf, biggest of all wild canids, will also look to the sea for dinner options. Wolves along the Pacific margin of northwestern North America—including the so-called “sea wolf” of southeastern Alaska and British Columbia’s temperate-rainforest coast—don’t just scavenge beachwrack, but also hunt harbour seals and sea otters. (The dearly departed lone wolf named “Staqeya” that pursued a solitary coastal living on the outskirts of the city of Victoria on British Columbia’s Vancouver Island some years back was an adept seal-hunter.)

Grey wolves boast quite the varied diet, but it’s hard to imagine it’s quite so diverse as that of its little cousin, the coyote (often known historically as the “brush wolf” or “prairie wolf”). A nose-to-tail omnivore, the songdog will happily nosh on papayas and mangoes in the Mexican tropics, wild grapes in the temperate deciduous forest, and cactus and mesquite beans in the North American deserts, alongside the dizzying range of carnivorous fare it’s wont to hunt or scavenge: from rodents, rabbits, waterfowl, and baby sea turtles up to deer, elk, and bison. And then there’s the dietary breadth exhibited by those coyotes that, famously (or infamously), thrive in urban environments: A study on such city-dwelling canids in southern California showed ornamental fruits, garbage, and domestic cats were big menu items, alongside more typical wild foods.

The season’s harsh weather and deep snow-cover pose the greatest threat: Winterkill is a big-time mortality factor for bison (often informally called “buffalo”). But it’s also one of the times of year when they’re most vulnerable to an ancient antagonist: the grey wolf.

On January 27th, David Swindler of Action Photo Tours caught rare footage of a successful bison hunt by what’s been one of the largest wolf packs in Yellowstone in recent years: the Wapiti Lake Pack. The event took place in the Hayden Valley, an expansive meadowed basin on the Yellowstone Plateau that’s both a linchpin of the Wapiti Lake Pack’s territory and part of the core range of Yellowstone’s central bison herd. (The Hayden Valley was also where, a few years ago, we reported on the Wapiti Lake wolves ganging up on a grizzly bear.)

Swindler told me by email that he and his fellow observers counted approximately 19 Wapiti Lake wolves participating in the buffalo hunt. “The bison circled the younger calves when they noticed the wolves approaching,” he said. “Some of the larger members of the herd would occasionally face off with the wolves in an effort to drive them away. But the Wapitis have learned to be very patient and persistent.”

According to Swindler, the wolves harried the bison defending the herd’s rear guard, wearing them down, ever watchful for an opportunity to strike. “When the herd started to run,” he said, “the defenders followed. This allowed the wolves to attack the bison from behind, eventually singling out a female. It didn’t take long for the wolves to take her down once she had split off from the herd.”

American bison—which come in two forms, the rangier wood bison of boreal Canada and Alaska and the slightly smaller but stockier plains bison of more southerly grasslands—are the biggest terrestrial mammals in North America, with bulls capable of weighing a ton or more. Their size, strength, endurance, and propensity for communal defence make them challenging prey for wolves, to say the least.

Calves and older bison compromised by injury, disease, or other conditions appear to be most targeted, but even a healthy adult buffalo can become vulnerable to a wolf pack when separated from a herd and (as perhaps this doomed Yellowstone cow was) exhausted from wheeling and running in deep snow. Indeed, on the Boreal Plains of northeastern Alberta, wolves most heavily prey on wood bison during late winter, and particularly when the snowpack exceeds 30 centimetres deep.

Grey wolves and bison have been tussling in North America since the Pleistocene, but drastic reductions in the geographic ranges of both due to hunting and other anthropogenic effects mean they overlap today in only a small fraction of their historical shared habitat. The trickiness bison pose as potential wolf chow (as well as the more general concept of a predator encountering a “novel” prey species) appears to be reflected in ecological trends observed when one or the other species has been reintroduced to former haunts.

In multiple regions where bison or wolf reintroductions have occurred, researchers have documented significant lag-times before wolves appeared to start attempting to take down buffalo. A 2023 study on wolf scavenging and predation on several reintroduced wood-bison herds in northwestern Canada suggested it took between a decade and a half-century for bison to show up on lupine menus. Increasing signs that wolves are consuming buffalo in these areas “provide unequivocal evidence that these reintroduced bison populations are becoming integrated into local food webs and beginning to be under selective pressure by their main predator,” the study authors wrote, “both of which are hallmarks of ecological restoration.”

By comparison, in Yellowstone, where wolves were reintroduced in 1995 and 1996, it actually didn’t take very long for some to start hunting bison: More than two dozen wolf-killed bison were confirmed between the spring of 1995 and the spring of 1999. However, elk—an abundant prey species significantly less dangerous to hunt than buffalo—were and remain the primary quarry of Yellowstone wolves. In the early days of “re-wolfed” Yellowstone, the Mollie’s Pack became particularly known for tackling bison: a special skill apparently born of the fact that elk didn’t winter in the Pelican Valley, centre of the Mollie’s wolves’ domain, leaving bison the only significant source of ungulate meat during that long, snowy season.

A 2014 study focused on wolf/bison interactions in Yellowstone since the wolf reintroduction suggested that a larger pack size—on the order of a dozen or more wolves—may be correlated with greater success preying on bison as compared with taking down elk.

Yellowstone National Park reports that bison have increasingly figured into the diets of the park’s wolves over the decades, though most of that feeding comes in the form of scavenging buffalo carcasses, and elk remain the number-one prey species. As Swindler’s footage shows, Yellowstone wolf packs may be more accustomed nowadays to giving bison-hunting a go, but that doesn’t mean it’s an easy undertaking.

The footage comes to us from Tamsyn du Toit who filmed the encounter recently on the western side of the Kruger National Park and shared her clip with Latest Sightings. An African civet – a raccoon-like omnivore in the same family as genets – is seen sauntering down a gravel road, seemingly unaware of a leopard slinking its way ever closer. The civet appears preoccupied, sniffing the air repeatedly, enticed either by the possibility of a tasty meal or by the scent-trail left by another animal. The leopard nestles into the long grass on the roadside, waiting for the perfect moment to strike.

After watching the civet shuffle to the other side of the gravel track, the cat follows, leaping into the undergrowth in pursuit and blowing her cover in the process. A short chase ensues, but the leopard gives up quickly, perhaps a little uncertain of her adversary's defensive abilities. 

Although leopards are opportunistic hunters, it's possible that this cat had not encountered a civet before, hence her circumspect approach. African civets are solitary, nocturnal creatures that usually spend their daylight hours huddled in a thicket for safety. They forage at night for everything from grass and fruit to rodents, reptiles and amphibians. Leopards also do much of their prowling under the cover of darkness and have a widely varied diet, so civets are not off the menu, but it's likely that leopards in Kruger opt for more traditional prey like impala and duiker.

Given the civet's relatively elusive nature and lack of a starring role in a Disney flick, you might not have heard of this rarely seen creature. But you may have come across kopi luwak, one of the world's most expensive coffees. This famous brew develops its smooth, earthy flavour inside the digestive tract of a palm civet, a species superficially similar to the African civet and also in the viverridae family. The palm civet's penchant for coffee cherries and its unintentional ability to ferment them in just the right way for a delicious cup of joe has, sadly, given rise to civet farming – the unethical practice of keeping civets in captivity and force-feeding them cherries. So maybe think twice before buying that pricey poo java.

African civets, meanwhile, have historically been exploited for a different, but equally rear-end related, reason: their sweet sweet musk. African civets, particularly the males, produce a pasty secretion from their perineal glands that's prized in the perfume industry. Although synthetic alternatives have largely replaced the real thing, "civet" – as the musky substance is also known – is still extracted from live animals in some areas, particularly in Ethiopia, a country responsible for around 90% of the world's civet production.

For civets in South Africa (where the clip above was filmed) the likelihood of abduction by gland-milking perfume henchmen is low, but other threats do exist. Civets are sometimes poisoned by landowners in an effort to protect livestock and crops, the mammals sometimes fall victim to snares while trekking down well-worn footpaths, and their nocturnal habits put them at increased risk of being hit by vehicles travelling on highways that cut through civet habitat.

Yet here’s a glimpse of that age-old interplay, coming to us from the eastern foothills of the Rocky Mountains in Alberta, Canada, and via a non-profit dedicated to the welfare of that area’s feral horses:

The footage, captured last year but only shared this month, shows a band of 'wildies' rebuffing wolves apparently intent on a foal.

Although North America is where, paleontological evidence suggests, equids evolved – and a place where wolves long shadowed them – they became extinct on the continent something like 8,000 to 11,000 years ago while persisting in Eurasia and Africa. Centuries ago, horses returned to the New World via European colonisers, and, one way or another, many escaped the confines of domesticated life and became free-ranging beasts on ancestral turf.

The east slope of the Alberta Rockies is one of several places in Canada host to feral horses (which south of the border in the US are commonly called mustangs – “wildie” and “mustang” being North American analogues to, for example, the “brumbie” of Australia). Previous research has documented that wolves in this region do sometimes take feral horses, alongside such wild ungulates as white-tailed and mule deer, elk, and moose. A 2022 study, meanwhile, showed that free-range horses on British Columbia’s Chilcotin Plateau form a significant food source for grey wolves; some of that horse-flesh, the authors note, surely comes through scavenging, but they also propose that wolf predation on, for example, foals and winter-weakened adult horses is likely. Another of Canada’s free-roaming horse herds, which calls west-central Saskatchewan’s Bronson Forest home, has also experienced wolf predation.

Although grey wolves overlap with both mustangs and domestic horses in other parts of North America, wolf predation on equids is better recorded from Eurasia. Wolves in Central Asia are known to prey on reintroduced Prezwalski’s horses (tahkis) and two subspecies of the Asiatic wild ass called the onager – the Mongolian and the Turkmenistan kulan – as well as domestic horses. Horses can also be significant parts of wolf diet in Southern Europe, including such comparatively rare, ancient, small breeds as the Petro horse of southern Italy, the Pottok of the Pyrenees, and various “mountain ponies” of the Iberian Peninsula, such as the Galician horse of northwestern Spain and the garrano of northwestern Portugal.

Such horses are often best described as semi-domesticated; traditional husbandry of Galicians and garranos sees them free-ranging most of their lives, only subjected to occasional roundups, and thus – unlike livestock brought in at night – out and about in wolf country most of the time. Research suggests that, where they overlap, mountain ponies can constitute the number-one prey of the Iberian wolf, the region’s subspecies of grey wolf.

Direct encounters between wolves and horses, such as the above video shows, have not been recorded terribly much in the scientific literature. But when they have, they often document a similarly aggressive defence as shown by the Alberta wildie stallion.

A 2022 paper, for example, summarised some predatory interactions between Iberian wolves and free-ranging ponies in northwestern Spain and Portugal via direct observations and interviews with shepherds. Mountain ponies alerted to the presence of wolves typically bunched together vigilantly. Approaching wolves prompted horses either to flee or to stand their group and “fend off wolves with rushes.” In one event relayed to the authors by a shepherd, a wolf chased ponies fleeing in a roughly linear, single-file line – a similar arrangement as has been reported in Alberta, the study noted, in which a large wildie harem noticing a nearby wolf departed “calmly” in a line “with the stallion protecting the rear.”

Iberian wolves do sometimes prey on full-grown horses – as in winter, when mountain ponies may be in poorer condition – but most of the accounts reported in this study saw foals the primary target. Both the stallion and mares in a given band would actively defend these youngsters: kicking at wolves with fore- and hind-legs, and also trying to bite.

Similar behaviour was reported from Mongolia’s Gobi National Park in a 1994 paper focused on Mongolian kulan, of which wolves are the primary predator. Researchers observed three wolves, one a lactating female, attacking a kulan foal and, in turn, being counter-attacked by a stallion and mare together – the former “mainly using open-mouth bite attempts and foreleg kicks, [the] mare mainly hindleg kicks, staying close to the foal.” A wolf ultimately killed the foal, but the feeding pack continued to endure occasional aggression from the kulan stallion and mare.

Equids follow two main social/breeding structures. One, seen in Grevy’s zebras and certain wild asses, is the territorial system, in which a male defends a territory (hopefully) situated auspiciously in relation to a resource – a waterhole, say, or good forage – which attracts females. The other system – which, as Richard D. Estes noted in The Behaviour Guide to African Mammals, is much rarer in the mammalian realm – is the harem model, wherein a single stallion manages a small coterie of mares, and harem-less males may form bachelor gangs. This is the lifestyle usually followed by plains and mountain zebras, Mongolian kulan, tahkis, and feral horses. Bonds between harem members are strong, and the band stallion will fiercely defend mares and foals not only from predators, but also rival males.

One hypothesis for how these two modes developed in equids is because of differing resource-distribution patterns. Deserts and other arid drylands, where water and pasture may be scattered widely in discrete areas across the landscape, the theory goes, might encourage the development of a territorial system in equids. Where resources are more evenly spread, a harem-style mode – as Estes notes, one in which stallions basically “substitute movable for fixed property” – could be supported.

But predation pressure might have played just as significant a role in the development of harems among equids. Group defence – mares ranking around vulnerable foals, the stallion engaging predators and, if the band is actively fleeing, putting up an aggressive rear guard – is “perhaps the most important advantage of the harem over the territorial system,” Estes writes.

The purpose of the 1994 study on Mongolian kulan referenced above was to try to ascertain whether this onager subspecies followed the territorial lifestyle typical of most other wild asses or, alternatively, the harem one.

In showing strong evidence for the latter in the wolf-harried Mongolian kulan, the authors proposed that perhaps an alternative or at least contributing factor to the harem/territoriality dichotomy in the horse family is the kind of predation equids are exposed to. While most territorial equids primarily contend with smaller or solitary hunters such as jackals (and the small Indian wolf, in the case of the Indian wild ass or onager), the harem-living species deal with large, “pack”-hunting beasts: grey wolves, African lions and spotted hyenas, to name a few formidable examples. Perhaps the communal defence afforded by a tight-knit breeding team of one stallion and several mares in face of such cooperative carnivores helped give rise to the wild-horse harem, even if the layout of resources was also a formative variable.

“The experience and perseverance of mares as well as the stamina in protective behaviour of stallions seem to be important functions influencing the outcome of [wolf] attacks,” wrote the authors of the 2022 paper focused on wolf/pony interactions in Northwest Iberia. “The level of cohesion in a band, which reinforces group defense, may also be important, including the ability of stallions to keep mares together, preventing them from becoming separated from the band and thus more vulnerable.” The authors suggest further “that more experienced mares may reduce predation by increasing vigilance and avoiding areas where the risk of being ambushed by wolves is higher.”

From Rocky Mountain forests to the rolling pastures of the Iberian Peninsula, free-roaming horses and wolves continue to enact their time-tested prey-predator dance. And in the former setting, those Alberta wildies aren’t only dodging wolves: Last year, we shared some HAWS clips showing grizzly bears tailing horses.

Top header image: Stefan Rusche/Flickr

Footage captured by Candice Pappin in Klaserie Private Nature Reserve adjacent to the Kruger National Park, shows a leopard tentatively manoeuvring his way around a muddy pond before eventually committing and diving in to nab a writhing fish.

Pappin had previously witnessed the cat visiting the waterhole and suspected he may be planning to 'go fishing'. After attempting to hunt a group of warthogs that strolled into the area, the commotion of the hunt triggered a reaction from the catfish and the leopard quickly turned his attention to the submerged quarry.

"Like a switch, it triggered something inside him," Pappin explained to Latest Sightings. "He ran straight onto the log and decided it was now or never! Looking at the fish, he reached into the muddy water, and with a swift movement, grabbed one! I couldn’t believe what I had just witnessed."

Pappin watched for some time as the leopard strategically plucked fish after fish out of the muddy water. “By the time he was done, he had caught 11 fish!" Some of the haul were stolen by rival predators while others he carefully stashed away for later.

Header image: Mihael Hercog/Flickr

Basically anteaters in ursid disguise, sloth bears are uniquely specialised for feeding on ants and termites (aka myrmecophagy); seasonally ripe fruits and honey help round out their diet. Yet a recent tally of all recorded attacks on people by large carnivores across the world between 1950 and 2019 attributed more to sloth bears than any other species – various dreaded big cats included.

The aggressiveness of the otherwise seemingly placid bug-slurping sloth bear has been long been recognised, even in tiger- and leopard-prowled country. “Should an unarmed wayfarer meet Master Bruin engaged in looking over his orchards, or sauntering over his domain, let him step aside silently lest he have his scalp drawn over his face, or his features so altered as to be unrecognisable by his most intimate friends,” wrote hunter Edward B. Baker in 1887’s Sport in Bengal.

Sloth bears indeed often direct their attacks at a person’s face, inflicting massive damage with their impressively long canines and claws. Earlier this month, a sloth bear killed a man and injured two others in India’s Chhattisgarh state; two farmers were mauled to death and another wounded last March in Andhra Pradesh when they encountered a sloth bear in a cashew orchard.

A new study published in Ecology & Evolution (from which we nabbed that Baker quote) suggests the dangerous pugnacity of the sloth bear is likely an anti-predator strategy evolved over several million years sharing the landscape with big cats – including, today, the royal Bengal tiger.

Though scientifically addressed in the paper, that theory wasn’t necessarily breaking news. One of the study’s authors, wildlife ecologist Thomas Sharp, told the New York Times he’d long asked local people living among sloth bears about their aggressiveness, and been told, “It’s because they fight with tigers.”

Specifically, it’s that violent defensiveness of the sloth bear combined with the landscapes it inhabits that seem to explain the relative danger it poses to humans. Some 90% of sloth bears today reside in India, the most populous country on Earth, and the species rubs shoulders very closely with people – not the same situation polar or grizzly bears, say, face across much of their range.

Bengal tigers – along with their relatives Amur tigers, as big as big cats come these days – occasionally kill and eat sloth bears. The bear’s food-getting routine, as the paper notes, puts them at special risk of tiger attack. Sloth bears shuffle about in forests, woodlands, scrub, and grasslands, with their heads to the ground sniffing for the scent of subterranean insect nests, blowing dirt away and sucking up their tiny quarry. Let’s just say it’s not a lifestyle that lends itself to extreme vigilance – and a tiger, a stalk-and-ambush sort of hunter, can often sneak within whisker’s reach of a bear without blowing its cover.

Here’s the deal, though: The sloth bear’s no pushover. Single-minded and hapless as this endearingly disheveled-looking ursid may appear while foraging, it can turn beast-mode on a dime. Upon noticing its predator – and “noticing,” in some cases, may be getting outright pounced upon – the bear often mounts a furious counter-attack, rearing up on hind legs, swiping with those hooked paws, huffing or roaring, and hurtling forward in fierce charges.

The Ecology & Evolution analysis, which took advantage of the relative proliferation of videos and photos capturing tiger/sloth-bear encounters in our smartphone age to study the phenomenon, suggests this is a pretty effective behaviour.

In the vast majority of cases it considered, little physical contact between tiger and bear ended up occurring, and neither species incurred injury. At medium and long ranges, sloth bears responded to tigers they keyed into in a variety of ways, including running away or staying still and watching the cat. But in up-close run-ins – a bear noticing a tiger within three metres – sloth bears “almost always reacted explosively, standing and then charging,” the study authors wrote. One defensive rush by the bear concluded most of these interactions, “indicating the general success of this strategy.”

Standing on its hind legs, a sloth bear reveals its bold white chest marking – a pattern it shares with sun bears and Asiatic black bears, which scientists have speculated may have developed in the three species to intimidate an attacking big cat. A tiger that can leap upon a bear from behind has a shot at dispatching it; a bear that detects its would-be predator and stands to face it makes a more formidable opponent, changing the odds – enough so that a tiger will often withdraw. The white crescent on the bear’s chest, the theory goes, makes the bear more imposing and drives home to the tiger that its attempted prey is aware and ready to actively defend itself.

(Along the same lines: Back in the late 1980s, a now-famous attempt to reduce the threat of tiger attacks in the Sundarbans mangrove forest on the India-Bangladesh borderland involved people wearing masks on the backs of their heads, the idea being tigers often attack from behind, and would be less inclined to do so if they mistook a mask for a person’s face aimed at them. It’s a tactic still sometimes employed.)

The study analysed 14 close encounters between sloth bears and tigers, 13 of which saw the bear stand, charge, and/or swat at the tiger and the encounter end without physical harm to either party. “In the single case where a bear showed no aggression, but simply remained still and whined loudly,” the authors wrote, “it was quickly dispatched, along with the cub on her back, by a large male tiger.”

The study notes that a number of the adaptations the sloth bear evolved for its myrmecophagous meal plan also double as part of its tiger defense system. The same long, curved claws the bear employs to dig out ant and termite nests are their number-one weapons against a big, striped threat. Sloth bears are also as splendidly shaggy as bears come; their long-haired coats not only lend them protection against ant bites, but also the rather more serious bites (and swipes) of tigers. Analysis of one of the videos the researchers examined suggested the thick neck ruff of a female sloth bear likely allowed it to endure a protracted assault by a big male tiger.

That hirsute coat also allows sloth-bear cubs to hitch rides atop their mothers: a primate-like behaviour not seen in other bears. There’s speculation that this is another anti-predator trait, given the digging claws of the sloth bear make even cubs mediocre at climbing trees, a defense strategy employed by two other ursids that contend with tigers, the sun bear and Asiatic black bear. A female sloth bear with her one or two cubs riding piggyback is free to throw herself, all gaping jaws and punching claws, against a tiger. (And sometimes not just one tiger: A case reported in a 1999 paper saw a mother sloth bear with cubs apparently ward off three of the predators.)

The new paper puts the sloth bear’s dealings with big cats in some fascinating evolutionary context. Evidence suggests modern tigers had crossed the Himalaya by 20,000 years ago, and subsequently spread across India. Sloth bears, which apparently never ranged much beyond their modern geography of present-day India as well as Sri Lanka, Bangladesh (where they’ve been extirpated), and the Terai lowlands of Nepal, have dealt with tigers since then – and also the roughly contemporaneous Asiatic lion, once much more widespread on the Indian subcontinent. (Though Asiatic lions – restricted to a tiny remnant range centred on the Greater Gir Landscape – don’t cross paths with sloth bears today in India, their group-hunting behaviour might conceivably have made them historically even more threatening to the bears than tigers.)

But the lineage of sloth bears appears to be several million years old, and they’ve apparently had to worry about huge felids for far longer than the tiger’s or lion’s arrival: The sloth bear’s ancient distribution and timeline overlapped with the saber-toothed cats Dinofelis and Megantereon as well as the Eurasian jaguar, which went extinct some 35,000 years ago. In other words, the sloth bear – outsized by its conspecific felids and unable to scramble up a tree – has long needed to protect itself in a more take-charge manner.

The ultimate thrust of the article is that the furious, hair-trigger bluster adopted by the sloth bear as a counter-assault against a predatory big cat doesn’t mix well with human beings. Most sloth bears today, after all, share landscapes densely populated by people. And a farmer or woodcutter can stumble as close to a head-down, ant-snuffling sloth bear as a hunting tiger – and thereby provoke the same immediate defensive aggression.

Trying to avoid such a sudden close encounter in the first place is a person’s best bet at avoiding a serious – maybe fatal – mauling, so making plenty of noise is good practice when wandering a bear-roamed wood. If confronted at close range or attacked, playing dead is the recommended response; the sloth bear, after all, is simply trying to neutralise a perceived threat, not eat you (or a tiger). Running away is not a good idea: A fleeing tiger might be able to outpace a sloth bear, but most people probably can’t.

Rearing, charging, and – if need be – swatting big cats has helped sloth bears survive amid those fearsome predators for a very long time. In a heavily and densely human-settled subcontinent, the strategy now tends to get the bear – which the IUCN Red List classifies as “Vulnerable” with a declining (and very habitat-fragmented) population – in trouble.

“Explosively charging and attacking a potential threat has served sloth bears well for hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of years,” the authors of the study conclude. “Only in recent times has this defensively aggressive behaviour become an issue for the conservation of the species: sloth bears that attack people are often killed, and local people that fear these bears are often not inclined to favour the presence of nearby populations.”

The IUCN’s 2017 Sloth Bear Global Assessment suggested conflict with people, in concert with drastic habitat loss, could see the species’ population decline by more than 30 percent in the coming few decades. The future of the tiger-fighting bear, in other words, is very much up in the air.

Header image: Knut-Erik Helle

The clip was filmed at a waterhole on the Botswana side of the reserve, a notoriously wild area known for high densities of predators. Big cats that live in this harsh environment have learnt to adapt to the conditions. Research indicates that leopard diets in the Kgalagadi are made up of porcupines, gemsbok calves, duikers, black-backed jackals, bat-eared foxes, steenboks and genets. In keeping with the leopards' documented reputation for dispatching smaller carnivores – especially when other prey is not widely available – small predators make up almost a quarter of the leopard's diet in the arid Kgalagadi.

Competition for prey is tough and leopards must battle it out with lions, hyenas and cheetahs (of which there are believed to be a higher density in the Kgalagadi), so nothing is off the menu. Leopards are also thought to travel larger distances in search of food compared to other predators in the area.

Birds certainly comprise at least some part of the diet of these cats and there are a number of records showing that leopards will actively hunt avian prey, often in dramatic fashion. Here's one leaping, swiping at, and narrowly missing a stork, and (in somewhat less-acrobatic style) here's a leopard raiding an owl's nest for a snack:

“I have to say it is the most astonishing thing to witness,” Stuart Armstrong, producer for the first episode of Mammals told the BBC about the scene. The footage captured on night vision cameras shows a female leopard honing in on her baboon dinner, eventually claiming one in fairly gruesome fashion.

“In complete darkness, all you can see is the screen of your camera and spotting scopes which we use to highlight to the cameraman what’s going on,”  Armstrong explains. “The leopards only hunt on the darkest night. If the moon is half full, they wait for it to set, so they have the advantage ... They can see in what to me is pitch black. But they’re not just seeing in pitch black; they are also running around in the canopy and jumping from branch to branch. They can judge distance in order to get their dinner.”

While on a recent trip to the park, Giosuè Spinosa filmed a dramatic encounter between a Nile crocodile and a sizeable black mamba that played out on the banks of the Shingwedzi River in the north of the reserve. Spinosa initially spotted the black mamba slithering across a patch of dry river sand en route to the water's edge. Like all snakes, black mambas will drink water when needed, but given the pace at which the snake was approaching the water, Spinosa suspected that it was planning to cross.

The commotion at the water's edge attracted the attention of a group of crocodiles basking on the bank nearby and one of them quickly moved in to investigate. As the mamba slithered into the shallows, a croc lunged in its direction but was easily outmanoeuvred by the agile snake. Black mambas are regarded as one of Africa's speediest snakes and even in the water this nimbleness comes in handy.

After gliding across the river and evading the opportunistic crocs, the mamba exited the water on the opposite bank but was almost immediately mired in the thick mud. As the snake struggled to make its escape, the crocs once again spied a potential meal. One of the crocs swam across the river and made a beeline for the mamba clamping its jaws around the snake and thrashing in typical croc fashion. 

Although black mambas pack a considerably toxic venom, their fangs are unlikely to be able to penetrate the thick, leathery skin of a croc and the snake was quickly dispatched of. The kill drew the attention of a fish eagle that swooped in hoping to nab an easy meal, but thought better of it. With the snake dangling in its mouth, the croc scampered back to the water to swallow its meal whole.

The thrilling encounter was filmed from a houseboat, and the resulting footage recently uploaded to the Latest Sightings YouTube channel. An initial foray down the sprawling, artificial lake yielded sightings of buffaloes and elephants, but things took a turn for the dramatic as the group returned and noticed a flurry of activity on Fothergill Island within the Matusadona National Park in Zimbabwe. "It appeared to be lions from a distance, and as we got closer, it became clear: 22 lions hunting a massive herd of impala," Simeoné Lategan explained to Latest Sightings.

In a typical ambush approach, the pride had split up and flanked the impala herd. Some of the lions were chasing the herd towards the lake where another contingent of cats were lying in wait. As the antelope approached the water's edge, they were met with a gauntlet of claws and jaws and had to use every ounce of athleticism to safely avoid the ambush. "Some of the impala came within inches of being caught, while others managed to make a safe escape," Lategan recalls.

One unlucky impala chose the wrong route and despite successfully clearing two of the big cats, it failed to dodge the third and the hunt ended abruptly in a cloud of dust at the water's edge. "One by one, the lions came running in to have a piece of the meal. A small antelope for 22 lions doesn’t last very long, so they all knew they had to grab what they could while it was still there," says Lategan.

"At this point, we just sat in awe of how lucky we were to have this sighting all to ourselves," she added. "Sitting on a boat a few metres from shore and watching 22 lions successfully hunt and eat an impala is not something everybody can say they have experienced."

It’s also easy to think of the plump little harbour seal as a prey animal: an almost bitesized morsel for orcas and white sharks – and even, at or around haul-outs, vulnerable to coastal grey wolves and brown bears.

But give this wee sea-beastie its due. Harbour seals aren’t just sluglike nappers, great-white popcorn, and orca footballs: They’re also versatile and efficient marine predators, active hunters of a whole array of fishes as well as crustaceans and mollusks. And while it well outsizes most of its own prey, the seal also sometimes sets its sights on pretty hefty quarry.

Pretty hefty multi-armed quarry, in the case of some rare footage nabbed on January 21st in the coastal brine of British Columbia. Divers off Nanoose Bay, Vancouver Island found themselves with front-row seats to a harbour seal’s vigorous attacks upon a giant Pacific octopus:

The giant Pacific octopus is, along with the seven-arm octopus, the biggest of its kind: Large specimens can well exceed 45 kilograms (100 pounds) and, exceptionally, span close to six metres (20 feet) across. We’re talking about as close to the mythical kraken as you can get (if you take that sea monster to be a gargantuan octopus rather than squid).

One of the two divers who witnessed the attack, Maxime Veilleux, a marine biologist, told Victoria, British Columbia’s Times Colonist that this seal-harried octopus was a male roughly two metres (6.6 feet) long. It discharged ink in its attempt to elude the marine mammal, which nonetheless was able to grab and ultimately tear off one of its eight arms.

The worse-for-wear octopus jetted off with its seven remaining appendages, while the harbour seal surfaced to gulp down its prize. As Veilleux noted to the newspaper, octopuses can regrow limbs.

The seal attack took place around sunset: a good time to observe giant Pacific octopuses, which typically shelter in seafloor dens during the day and hunt – for crabs, clams, fish, and other critters – mainly at night. (Though not always: A giant Pacific octopus lunched on a gull in broad daylight off the Victoria, BC waterfront back in 2012.)

This isn’t the first seal attack on giant Pacific octopuses caught on camera: In 2015, a harbour seal was photographed dispatching one off Victoria’s Ogden Point, where a couple of years before onlookers had filmed another seal/octopus encounter that didn’t end well for the cephalopod:

And pinnipeds with this sort of palate certainly aren’t confined to Canadian waters. In 2017, kayakers in South Bay, New Zealand filmed a brawny male fur seal dismembering a good-sized octopus:

But the British Columbia observation from last month is unique for being filmed down in Davy Jones’ locker. “To my knowledge,” Veilleux told the Times Colonist, “this is the first time this has been captured on camera. People see sea lions on the surface eating octopus, but you never see it underwater.”

Harbour seals, meanwhile, aren’t the only predators of the brainy and formidable giant Pacific octopus, also targeted, for example, by other pinnipeds—the Steller sea lion included—and various sharks (such as sevengills and Pacific sleeper sharks). And in the disarmingly cute octopus-eater department, harbour seals get a run for their money from sea otters, which are also disposed to a little kraken-snackin’ now and then.

Header image: Charles J. Sharp

From British Columbia to California, pumas – also commonly called mountain lions or cougars – have been photographed or filmed taking down deer, overall their most important North American prey.

But what makes this new piece of puma/deer footage we’re presenting to you here really noteworthy – aside from the remarkably well-framed view of the big cat locking onto the deer’s throat and then dragging off the carcass – is where it happened: not somewhere in the American or Canadian West, where mountain lions remain widespread, but on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula (aka the “UP”), in the US Midwest. And rather than the mule or black-tailed deer that western pumas commonly take down, the victim here is a white-tailed deer.

Eli Schaefer scored the low-odds video on his trail cam near Toivala, Michigan, situated on the UP's Keewenaw Peninsula, late last year. Schaefer told Outdoor Life he was originally going to delete the trail cam cards without checking the footage, but decided to briefly review them earlier this month to see whether any whitetail bucks had managed to survive the latest hunting season.

“So I played it,” he said in the Outdoor Life article, “and I was like, oh my God. I got chills just thinking about how easily I could have been standing there, and that thing could’ve jumped on me.”

(They may be among a deer’s worst nightmares, but pumas only very rarely attack people, to be clear.)

Last October, Schaefer captured a cougar on a trail cam set up about a mile from this spot, and reckons this deer-killer is the same cat – a theory that Denise Peterson of Utah Mountain Lion Conservation, a former Michigan resident, agreed with. Peterson also told Outdoor Life that the puma in Schaefer’s footage is almost assuredly a large adult male (or tom).

Pumas are native to Michigan, but were extirpated between the late 19th and early 20th centuries; the last legally harvested puma was taken in 1906 on the UP. But Schaefer’s trail-cam capture – while particularly significant for the predatory behaviour it records – is only the latest in a whole slew of pumas confirmed in the state in recent years.

There have been more than 75 verified sightings of pumas in Michigan since 2008, all but one of them on the UP, which by Midwestern standards is quite wild and thinly populated, and which forms the eastern part of a contiguous swath of heavily forested terrain widely known as the “North Woods” that stretches westward into northern Wisconsin and Minnesota. Those two states have also recorded numerous puma confirmations this century. Last fall, for instance, a bowhunter in Buffalo County, Wisconsin shot a young male puma – the first killed in that state in more than a century – from a treestand out of what he claimed was self-defence.

Two of the documented Michigan cougars since 2008 were poached, and DNA analysis of their carcasses found genetic connections to established puma populations in South Dakota – indicating likely wild origin and natural dispersal, in other words. The Michigan Department of Natural Resources (DNR) does not presently believe the state to host a breeding stock of cougars. It’s thought that these Michigan pumas, like the one Schaefer’s trail cam captured, have probably all been males. Given, as in many carnivore species, young male cougars typically disperse longer distances than females, this further suggests these UP cats hail from western populations, and could be part of a vanguard attempting to recolonise former habitat in the Midwest.

Perhaps the best-known of dispersing eastern cougars was the tom that roamed more than 2,414 kilometres (1,500 miles) from the Black Hills of South Dakota, which support a breeding population, to the US East Coast. Killed in 2011 on a Connecticut highway (within shouting distance of New York City), that peripatetic puma is thought to have passed through the UP on its spectacular, if ill-fated, odyssey. (In 2008, another high-profile Black Hills disperser, a healthy and apparently well-fed 68-kilogram [150-pound] tom, found its way to the big city of Chicago, Illinois, where it was killed out of public-safety concerns by police officers.)

The Michigan DNR verified the first puma sighting on the state’s more populous Lower Peninsula in modern times in June 2017, but noted that it wasn’t clear whether that puma, photographed in Bath Township, had a wild or captive origin. “There is no way for us to know if this animal is a dispersing transient from a western state, like cougars that have been genetically tested from the UP, or if this cat was released locally,” a member of the DNR’s Cougar Team said in a statement at the time.

Separated from the UP by two Great Lakes (Michigan and Huron) and bounded to the south by a much more built-up and peopled landscape, the Lower Peninsula would certainly appear to be a harder-to-reach destination for a dispersing puma. “While cougars have a route of suitable habitat eastward through Minnesota and Wisconsin into the UP,” the Detroit Free Press explained in 2021, “for a cat to make it into the Lower Peninsula would require either crossing miles of frozen Great Lakes ice from the UP, or coming around the barriers of Lake Michigan and heavily populated areas around Chicago and northern Indiana.”

“The largest block of historic puma range in all the Americas that does not currently support breeding puma populations comprises the Midwest and Eastern USA,” wrote the authors of a Biodiversity & Conservation paper published last year that assessed potential puma habitat in this region. The comparatively smaller swath of historic puma country in eastern Canada similarly mostly lacks a breeding population. The main puma outpost in eastern North America at this point is southern Florida, where the unique cougar variety known as the Florida panther clings to survival amid fragmented subtropical wildlands.

That 2023 Biodiversity & Conservation study identified 17 blocks of potential habitat in the eastern US that could likely support viable breeding populations of pumas. The largest block was the combined 59,462 square kilometres (about 23,000 square miles) of northern Wisconsin and the UP, with an additional 39,831 square kilometres (15,378 square miles) in the adjacent North Woods of Minnesota. Two smaller habitat blocks, separated by interstate highways, were identified in the northern section of Michigan’s Lower Peninsula.

Sure, there’s a reintroduced population of elk roaming the northeastern Lower Peninsula, several hundred moose are found on the UP, and a wide variety of smaller mammals – raccoons to porcupines to snowshoe hares – are found across the state. But there's no question the premier puma chow in Michigan is indeed the white-tailed deer, an estimated two million of which roam the state. That said, the largest proportion of whitetails are found in Michigan’s southern Lower Peninsula, host to much more extensive suburban sprawl and farmland: landcover that’s actually generally more conducive to deer than the vast closed forests of the UP.

Wildlife managers consider whitetails overpopulated in Michigan, with the declining popularity of hunting and low predation pressure in many areas among the challenges to addressing the situation. (Wolves, the primary wild deer predator in the Midwest, are presently restricted in the state to the UP and the Lake Superior island of Isle Royale.) And that situation is not ideal, not least because lots of deer in road-laced southern Michigan means more deer-vehicle collisions. The restoration of a breeding puma population could help provide a natural whitetail control, though the most deer-friendly part of the state – that southern Lower Peninsula – is also the least puma-friendly.

Incidentally, Eli Schaefer’s trail cam video from the UP isn’t the only recent capture of mountain lions on the leading edge of North American range recolonization doing what they do best in their old stomping grounds. In September of last year, trail cameras in Shannon County, Missouri – a state that, like Michigan, used to but no longer supports a breeding cougar population, but which has seen numerous sightings of apparent dispersing cats in recent decades – showed a puma attending to a freshly killed cow elk.

Header image: [ Greg ]/Flickr

From above the tiger shark’s grey silhouette stands stark against the sun-drenched sands of the sea-floor below. With flowing, almost lethargic, strokes of its tail the shark cruises slowly through the water. As it drifts past a sea turtle, its behaviour suddenly shifts. This time the shark doesn’t continue on its way, as it has done during previous turtle encounters, rather its attention locks in on the reptile.

Directed by senses which have evolved over millions of years for this exact situation, the shark effortlessly closes the distance to the now-alarmed turtle. As the shark hones in on its prey, both animals show a breathtaking display of agility and ingenuity during the ensuing battle. Early on in the encounter, the juvenile tiger shark manages to latch onto one of the turtle’s pectoral (front) flippers in what seems to be a swift end to the affair. Unbelievably, the sea turtle breaks free from the shark’s toothy grip and makes a dash for the safety of the shallow reef – at one point even swimming upside down over its pursuer to keep its shell between vital organs and foe. Although its first potential victim escapes, the shark is undeterred and quickly hones in on another turtle. Once again, the predator grabs a pectoral flipper, yet again the turtle slips free and manages to escape.

This encounter “is not like anything I’ve ever seen”, says drone operator and cinematographer, Carlos Gauna, in the voiceover to his footage posted on his YouTube channel ‘The Malibu Artist’. These are strong words from someone who spends much of his time capturing mesmerising (and often thrilling) drone footage of great white sharks off the coast of southern California.

Gauna, who is “constantly on the search for places that are not necessarily well-known as shark hotspots”, was drawn to the Fernando de Noronha archipelago when he learned about a series of shark attacks which occurred in Sueste Bay, where this footage was captured. Gauna retells that he was immediately stunned by the number of sharks he observed during his first flight over the island. He saw ten lemon sharks hunting anchovies just off the beach. “My first thought was, ‘this is amazing, I wish I could have this water clarity in Southern California’” he told me over email.

The Islands

Rising steeply from the deep ocean floor, an immense undersea volcano dominates the underwater world about 350 kilometres off the coast of Brazil. Four thousand metres above its base, the summit just barely breaks the water’s surface, forming the emerald-green Fernando de Noronha islands embraced by the cobalt backdrop of the southern Atlantic Ocean. Flora and fauna have congregated in this tropical refuge over the 1.5 million years since its formation. As a result, the archipelago boasts a near pristine measure of biodiversity. In fact, 70% of the island’s area is a protected national park and UNESCO World Heritage site.

The tiger shark population of the islands is globally unique. It boasts the highest genetic diversity of any known tiger shark population, and a recently published study suggests that sharks from far and wide congregate in these nutrient-rich waters to reproduce. Dr Bianca Rangel, an author of this study, tells me that the Fernando de Noronha archipelago “is the only area in the Southern Atlantic Ocean proven to play this role in the life cycle of tiger sharks”.

A New Hypothesis

The region, particularly Sueste Bay, may play another important function in the life cycle of tiger sharks – one which is only coming to light through the unique insights drone-based data collection offers. After observing the behaviour of sharks in the bay during his visit, Gauna suspected that juvenile tiger sharks may be using the bay’s shallow waters as ‘practice grounds’ to develop turtle-hunting techniques. His footage and insights prompted Rangel and Fabio Borges – drone documentarian and president of the NGO ‘Instituto Vida na Oceano – to begin utilising daily drone flights as part of their project ‘Tubarões e Raias de Noronha’. Borges tells me that their preliminary observations may support the hypothesis that juvenile sharks are using the area to practice hunting. The researchers almost exclusively see juvenile tiger sharks operating in the bay and although they have recorded dozens of predation attempts on turtles, none have been successful.

Hunting and eating a turtle is no easy feat. The hard, keratin-coated shells of sea turtles are specifically designed to protect the soft internal tissue from attacks by predators. Although tiger sharks are often called ‘generalist’ predators – they’ll indulge themselves on a wide variety of food (and non-food items such as metal, tires, etc.) – they are, in fact, the only extant shark species which has evolved a specialised ‘tool-kit’ to hunt turtles. Their jaws are reinforced with calcium and fused at the centre, allowing the sharks to withstand the immense pressures of biting through turtle shells. These same jaws are lined with strong, heavily serrated teeth, and are able to extend out from the tiger shark’s skull to latch onto difficult-to-grab turtles. Once the sharks have secured their prey, they oscillate their jaws in a unique back and forth motion, effectively ‘sawing’ through the turtle’s shell.

Elsewhere in the world, a recent video captured by Ruth Gaw off the coast of Western Australia shows a tiger shark almost beaching itself in an attempt to catch a turtle.

These adaptations are a result of ‘co-evolution’ between tiger sharks and turtles which has taken place over hundreds of millions of years. A primordial back-and-forth between predator and prey has equipped each with weapons, defences, and strategies that offer an edge over the other. Interestingly for turtles, the asset which most influences their likelihood of surviving a bump-in with a tiger shark is not necessarily any physical defence – like the strength of their shell – but rather, it's their ability to outmanoeuvre the speedy shark. As we see in the video, once the turtle breaks free from the shark’s grasp on its flipper, it displays remarkable agility in dodging the tiger shark’s attacks. From spinning in tiny circles to swimming upside down right above the shark’s head at one point, the turtle manages to keep its shell between itself and the predator before eventually out-swimming the shark to safety.

One can understand why, after watching this impressive display of manoeuvrability from this seemingly ‘lethargic’ sea reptile, more experienced adult tiger sharks may choose a different tactic when hunting turtles. Rather, according to a previous study, the ambush predators generally surprise the marine reptiles from below, incapacitating the turtle before it is able to mount an escape.

Borges explains that before any conclusions can be drawn about habitat usage or differences in hunting techniques between juvenile and adult tiger sharks, more research is needed. He is, however, optimistic, claiming that using drones to capture shark data “is pioneering in Fernando de Noronha, and the preliminary results are very encouraging.”

A new era for research

Clearly, collaborations between videographers like Gauna, scientists like Rangel, and conservationists like Borges can provide the creative impetus to utilise new technologies in innovative ways to the benefit of all. Borges summarises this nexus quite well, “Just as the drone opened up an entirely new approach in generating images for documentaries a few years ago, we realise that there are many new possibilities to be explored in scientific research. The drone allows for new perspectives, both literally and figuratively.”

Top header image: Barry Skinstad

The past year or so, however, has turned up some impressive footage on that front out of the US state of Minnesota, a hotspot for research into the wolf/beaver dynamic. And the latest video is perhaps the most impressive yet.

It was taken this past fall by a deer hunter, Jon Galler, near Hill City, Minnesota, and shared by the Voyageurs Wolf Project, which researches the boreal wolves of the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem farther north in the state.

In its post, the Voyageurs Wolf Project shared some insights into the event gleaned from Galler. He’d been watching the beaver – thought to be a kit on the order of six or seven months old – for about a quarter of an hour before the wolves showed up and crossed the nearby beaver dam. The beaver had been grooming itself on a rock in the shallows of the beaver pond, and both wolves and rodent appeared unaware of one another until the lead wolf finished a bout of scent-marking. Its scraping spooked the beaver, which plopped into the water, thus alerting the wolf.

“The wolf heard the beaver slip into the water and immediately changed its behaviour,” the post explains. “You can see this clearly in the video. The wolf then bounded into the pond and caught the beaver, which was entirely below the water.”

A 2016 study in Voyageurs National Park found evidence of wolves dragging beavers out of their feeding canals and other waterways to dispatch them onshore, based on analysis of kill sites. The Voyageurs Wolf Project notes that Galler’s video, however, appears to be the first direct observation of a wolf successfully catching a beaver that’s swimming fully underwater.

In most of the northerly realms where wolves and beavers co-occur, the rodents are most exposed to predation during the ice-free seasons, as their wintertime goings-on in frozen-over waterbodies and lodges keep them mostly out of the reach of wolves. From spring through fall, beavers in such forestlands are more at risk on account of open water and the need to forage onshore and conduct upkeep on lodges.

This also overlaps with the time of year when wolves often prowl alone or in small groups as opposed to hunting as a full pack, as is typical in winter, when mature deer and other ungulates anchor the boreal wolf diet. Beavers, as well as newborn ungulates and other smaller animals, are prized summer prey for wolves hunting solo or in pairs; growing beaver kits that are out and about on their own (as this unfortunate little guy in Minnesota was) in summer and fall are particularly vulnerable.

The predation in this case was apparently opportunistic: The wolf suddenly noticed the young beaver and literally sprang into action. It’s possible, of course, that these wolves were intentionally traveling along the beaver dam and pond to search for beavers. But research out of the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem has shown that wolves there deploy a number of specialised hunting tactics to specifically target beavers, among them lying in wait beside waterways or feeding trails to snag the paddle-tailed critters as they come ashore or commute on land. Such ambush attempts may see wolves crouched for hours at a time – a far cry from the cursorial (running) pursuit after fleet-footed game with which these wild canids are most associated.

A study from last year suggested the threat of wolf ambush may limit how far beavers forage from the (relative) safety of water, and could conceivably therefore impact the spatial event of beaver-gnawed forest in boreal ecosystems. A decades-old paper found that beavers preyed on by black bears on Stockton Island – part of the Apostle Islands off northern Wisconsin’s Lake Superior shore – foraged closer to water than their counterparts on nearby, and bear-less, Outer Island.

While a beaver might not be as intimidating a prey item as a swift deer or a giant ornery moose, don’t suppose it’s a pushover. After all, North American and Eurasian beavers are the second-biggest rodents on Earth after the capybara of South America – they may tip the scales beyond 27 kilograms (60 pounds) – and those tree-felling chompers of theirs can pack a punch. As the Voyageurs Wolf Project notes in its post about Miller’s video, the wolf’s capture would likely have been a bit tougher had the beaver in question been full-grown. Indeed, one Twitter user commented on the post: “As a boy in the 1960s I met a hunter who had observed an adult beaver killing a wolf, in defence, by dragging it into the pond and drowning it.”

Wolves and American black bears, meanwhile, aren’t the only carnivores with a taste for beaver meat. Others documented to actively prey on beavers include wolverines, red foxes (which sometimes snag small kits), and pumas. One puma in western Colorado even appeared to become a beaver specialist. And a few years ago, a livecam caught an Alaskan brown bear that was fishing in Katmai National Park & Preserve happily snatch a beaver that just about cruised right into its lap:

Top header image: Yellowstone National Park/Flickr

Orcas have been putting on quite the predatory show off the coast of California in recent months. 

In Southern Californian waters, orcas of the Eastern Tropical Pacific (ETP) stock – thought to mainly range from Mexico’s Baja Peninsula down to South America – on a northerly swim-about have been dramatically visible while pursuing some of their smaller cousins. This month, for example, the killer whales were filmed hunting common dolphins off San Diego, including an orca ramming a dolphin clear out of the water in what appeared to be a training exercise for a young member of the pod.

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“The orcas catch the dolphin, but let it go after it’s subdued because it’s not as fast anymore, and they bring the baby orca over to try and catch it itself,” Domenic Biagini of Gone Whale Watching, who shared the footage of the dolphin-punting, told NBC News.  

It’s not just common dolphins that have been landing on the ETPs’ menu in Southern California lately: Back in October, the orcas were seen hot on the tail of bottlenose dolphins, which attempted high-leaping acrobatics to steer clear of their big, black-and-white relatives.

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“There’s no way for us to know what made them decide to take a road trip up the coast,” California Killer Whale Project lead research biologist Alisa Schulman-Janifer explained to NBC San Diego. “But we do know that they linger in areas where dolphins are. They may be revisiting places where they had a lot of success.”

Indeed, ETP whales, while overall a rare sight here, do make cameos off Southern California, including in 2019, when they chased dolphins near San Clemente. These killer whales can be distinguished from other orca subtypes that periodically ply regional waters – including so-called transient (or Bigg’s) orcas, which prey on marine mammals, and fish-eating resident orcas – by their more faded-looking saddle patches and the barnacles that commonly stud their dorsal fins. 

Research on ETP orcas suggests they may have a more generalist menu compared with some other better-studied populations of killer whales, pursuing not only dolphins and other marine mammals (up to the size of blue whales) but also rays, bony fish, and sea turtles. The California Killer Whale Project notes that ETP orcas “are not a defined ecotype; the ETP designation refers to the area in which they are most often encountered (between the Mexican border and the equator).” 

Orcas – the biggest members of the dolphin family, and sitting pretty at the apex of the oceanic food chain – are known to snack on a wide variety of smaller toothed whales. They may engage in “herding” strategies to snag dolphins, and the kind of torpedoing move the ETP whales were seen doing with common dolphins has been documented elsewhere –as have apparent dolphin-dispatching lessons for young orcas. In one 2013 incident off Argentina, relayed in an Aquatic Mammals paper, a female orca known as Maga struck a dusky dolphin to devastating effect while hunting with several other adult killer whales and a calf. “The injured dolphin tried to swim away,” the researchers wrote, “but Maga took it with her mouth and gently brought it to the calf, which, at times, repeated the same ‘tossing the prey up into the air’ behaviour.”

Meanwhile, farther north up the California seaboard, Bigg’s orcas have also recently been wowing onlookers with high-octane hunts of sea lions in Monterey Bay (where, incidentally, a white killer whale nicknamed “Frosty” showed up this past October):

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According to the California Killer Whale Project, some of these sea-lion hunts may also have served as hunting tutorials for orca calves. Predation 101’s been in session up and down the Golden State coast, it seems.

Top header image: Miles Ritter, Flickr

A recent paper in Ecology underscores the dietary (and strategic) versatility of the gray wolf – historically among the most widely distributed large carnivores on Earth – and, more specifically, just how marine-oriented the menus of coastal wolves along the Pacific margin of northwestern North America can be.

The research, conducted along the seacoast of Katmai National Park and Preserve in southwestern Alaska, was partly prompted by an observation from May 2016. That’s when National Park Service (NPS) rangers saw a white wolf trotting along a Katmai beach with a dead sea otter in its jaws. (Sarah Keartes wrote about this sighting for Earth Touch News at the time.)

Among the questions the researchers set out to investigate were whether Katmai wolves were preying on or simply scavenging sea otters, and how common the behaviour was.

The effort yielded evidence that wolves of the Katmai coast appear to actively hunt sea otters where the animals haul out. Not only that, but the study authors report on the observation (also in 2016) of a male gray wolf attacking and killing a harbor seal near the mouth of an intertidal creek over the course of about half an hour.

The research suggests that wolves here may target marine mammals at haul-out sites and other vulnerable shoreline areas particularly during low tides.

“Our observations indicate that solitary wolves may successfully ambush seals and sea otters on the Katmai coast and may have developed unique hunting and foraging strategies compared with their interior counterparts,” the study authors wrote.

A significant rebound of sea-otter numbers off southern Alaska following drastic reductions during the historical North Pacific Rim fur trade may be giving coastal wolves new options for carnivory. Indeed, another recent paper – this one published last year in PNAS – showed that sea otters can even become a primary prey, as they apparently did for a wolf pack on southeastern Alaska’s Pleasant Island after a major die-off of black-tailed deer (a standard go-to quarry for wolves in the region).

“This just kind of adds to the body of evidence that wolves are definitely impacting the nearshore environment and potentially marine mammals and their populations,” Kelsey Griffin of the NPS, part of the group that saw the 2016 otter-hauling wolf, told Daba Kobilinsky for The Wildlife Society.

Moving from Katmai farther eastward and southward down North America’s Pacific seaboard, in the realm of the world’s most extensive tract of temperate rainforest, a unique coastal form of gray wolf, widely called the “sea wolf,” readily swims between offshore islands and pursues a diet that may be as much as 85 percent marine-based.

These sea wolves, found from southeastern Alaska to British Columbia’s Vancouver Island, will also hunt harbor seals and sea otters – plus scarf the brains of spawning salmon (perhaps to avoid a potentially fatal bacterium found in salmon kidneys and muscle tissue), crunch clams and mussels, and scavenge all manner of beachwrack, whale carcasses included. Their menus can be strikingly distinct from interior mainland gray wolves not all that far away (as the raven flies), which subsist mainly on ungulates such as moose, deer, and mountain goats.

Speaking of ungulates, though, they are indeed generally the most important gray-wolf chow across the global domain of Canis lupus: all manner of deer (from little roe deer to huge wapiti and moose), wild boar, antelope (such as blackbuck and saiga), wild goats, various mountain sheep, wild asses, muskoxen, and more – ranging in size up to bison – are on the menu.

This is the classic image of the gray wolf: a pack coursing swiftly after a gangly moose or fleet-footed stag through the woods, or stampeding a caribou herd out on the tundra.

But wolves are adaptable opportunists, and sea otters and harbor seals are far from the only non-hoofed meat they’ll go after. Arctic hares and rodents help round out the diet of Arctic wolves, northernmost of all wolves. Wolves in Pakistan may snatch rhesus monkeys and palm civets along with marmots, pikas, and Cape hares, while red foxes and European badgers appear to be preyed on by wolves in parts of Europe with some frequency. In spring, wolves in northern Minnesota’s Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem pounce on spawning suckers – a freshwater fish – in similar fashion as sea wolves do salmon. Small mammals and reptiles are primary wild foods of the imperiled, little-known Arabian wolf, smallest and most exclusively desert-adapted of all gray-wolf subspecies.

In parts of boreal North America, including eastern Canada and the Minnesota Northwoods, beavers can be a significant prey item. Research in the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem shows that wolves may employ a catlike ambush strategy – sometimes lying in wait for 12 hours or more – to catch beavers coming ashore. A brand-new study reveals beavers here are especially vulnerable to wolf predation while commuting on longer feeding trails, which take them farther away from the protection of water to cut trees.

Earlier this year, the Voyageurs Wolf Project shared some rare, super-lucky trail-cam footage showing wolves hunting – and, in one case, catching – beavers:

Beaver-hunting is often the pursuit of solitary wolves, and this points up the seasonal variation in gray wolf diet and hunting behaviour. Wolves in, say, the Great Lakes forests of the Upper U.S. Midwest and Canada may spend the winter pack-hunting adult white-tailed deer and moose. In summer, though, with such ungulates in peak physical form and a hungry denful of pups demanding loads of nosh, wolves here often split up as singletons or pairs to prowl for hidden-away newborn deer fawns, beavers, snowshoe hares, and other smaller prey.

And while gray wolves are among the most hypercarnivorous of canids, they will scarf plant material. Indeed, ripe berries and fruits may be significant seasonal menu items in some areas, such as parts of Europe as well as in the boreal forest, where blueberries can be an important summertime food: 

The seafood-fond wolves of the Katmai Coast, like their brethren the sea wolves, inhabit an extremely productive, fauna-rich landscape with only a small human footprint. Many gray wolves in other parts of the world – in lower-productivity biomes and, especially, where the impacts of humanity on ecosystems are heavier – face a different situation. Especially where land modification and other anthropogenic impacts have reduced populations of wild prey, wolves may be forced to rely more heavily on livestock and other domestic animals as well as refuse.

One study in central Iran found that gray wolves there, “with a relatively high abundance of anthropogenic foods and a moderately low abundance of wild prey,” subsisted mainly on poultry, domestic goats, and garbage. In Israel’s Negev Desert, Arabian wolves seem to primarily rely on agricultural forage and garbage and are strongly associated with human settlements, cropland, and roads.

It goes without saying that wolves setting their sights on goats or cows or sheep are unlikely going to be popular with the local human populace. But evidence suggests that the resourceful and opportunistic Canis lupus is, where it has the opportunity, more disposed to hunt wild prey than domestic animals. A study comparing the feeding habits of Iberian wolves in northern Portugal, for instance, found that in a natural park with abundant wild prey – roe deer, red deer, and wild boar – wolves mainly targeted those species. By comparison, in another park more intensively modified by human activities and with low availability of wild ungulates, wolves survived on livestock.