Gray Wolf / Eurasian Wolf

Canis lupus lupus

Eurasian Gray Wolf

“A man might befriend a wolf, even break a wolf, but no man could truly tame a wolf.”

– George Raymond Richard Martin

Scientific Taxonomy & Character Information

Domain: Eukaryota

Kingdom: Animalia

Phylum: Chordata

Clade: Synapsida

Class: Mammalia

Order: Carnivora

Family: Canidae

Genius: Canis

Species: Canis lupus

Subspecies: Canis lupus lupus

Descendant: Canis mosbachensis

Named by: Carl Linnaeus

Year Published: 1758

Size: 80 – 85 cm tall in height; 1 – 1.6 m in length; 30 – 80 kg in weight

Lifespan: 8 to 80+ years

Type: 

Title: 

Pantheon: Terran/Gaian

Time Period: Pleistocene - Holocene

Alignment: Neutral

Threat Level: ★★★★

Diet: Omnivorous 🥩🌿

Elements: n/a

Inflicts: Gnashed

Weaknesses: Fire, electric, arcane, sound, light

Casualties: 

Based On: itself

Conservation Status: Least Concern (LC) – IUCN Red List 

Gray Wolf, Eurasian Grey Wolf, Timber Wolf, Wild Dog, Common Wolf, European Wolf, Eurasian Wolf, or simply called as Wolf (Canis lupus or Canis lupus lupus), is a large canine native to Eurasia and North America. More than thirty subspecies of Canis lupus have been recognized, and gray wolves, as popularly understood, comprise wild subspecies. The wolf is the largest extant member of the family Canidae. The grey wolf is also considered the ancestor of the domestic dog.


This animal was introduced in every series of Earth Responsibly universe.

Etymology

The English "wolf" stems from the Old English wulf, which is itself thought to be derived from the Proto-Germanic *wulfaz. The Proto-Indo-European root *wĺ̥kʷos may also be the source of the Latin word for the animal lupus (*lúkʷos). It was held in high regard in Baltic, Celtic, Slavic, Turkic, ancient Greek, Roman, and Thracian cultures, whilst having an ambivalent reputation in early Germanic cultures.

Physical Appearance

The grey wolf, the largest living member of the Canidae family, stands out from coyotes and jackals thanks to its longer tail, wider snout, shorter ears, and shorter body. It has a big, deeply descended rib cage, a sloping back, and a highly muscled neck. It is slim and robustly constructed.


Because of its slightly longer legs than other canids, the grey wolf can move quickly and navigate the heavy snow that covers the majority of its geographic range in the winter. The grey wolf has a huge, hefty skull, strong jaws, a long, blunt nose, and a wide forehead. This dog has long, coarse guard hairs, a short undercoat, and extremely dense, fluffy winter fur. Due to changes in appearance, the guard hairs on a grey wolf's coat determine the color of its coat. Most of the undercoat and some guard hairs are shed in the spring and grow back in the fall.


Wolves usually have some hairs that are white, brown, gray and black despite their name “gray”. The mixture of ochreous (yellow to orange) and rusty ochreous (orange/red/brown) colors with light gray. The muzzle is pale ochreous gray, and the area of the lips, cheeks, chin, and throat is white. A reddish coating covers the top of the head, the forehead, the area under and between the eyes, and the area between the eyes and ears. It has an ochreous neck. With black hair tips on the shoulders, upper chest, and back of the body, the long, black hairs along the back form a broad stripe. The inner sides of the limbs, belly, and groin are white, whereas the sides of the body, tail, and outside limbs are a light dirty ochreous tint. They have hazel eyes, which are nocturnal.


Unlike other British creatures, gray wolves were unaffected by island dwarfism, with certain skeletal remains indicating that they may have grown as large as Arctic wolves due to island gigantism.

Abilities

Grey wolf is very agile and can easily climb up and jump off walls and large rocks. It is agile enough to perform several attacks in a row using its fangs and forelimbs.


It's referred to as a chorus howl when several wolf packs howl simultaneously. The sound of chorus howls is similar to the long, clear howls you may have heard in movies or documentaries, but it also occasionally includes deep, aggressive-sounding barks and shorter, higher-pitched howls from puppies.

Ecology

Ranges in all northern habitats where there is suitable food and resources, densities being highest where prey biomass is highest rate in the real world and in Earth Responsibly (as part of Tangled Adevnture, Beauty and the Beast, and Disney's Frozen). Food is extremely variable, but the majority comprises large to small ones. Grey Wolves will also eat smaller prey items, livestock, carrion, and garbage. Like all land mammals that are pack hunters, the grey wolf feeds predominantly on wild herbivorous hoofed mammals that can be any size depending on a body mass similar to that of the combined mass of the pack members. The wolf specializes in preying on the vulnerable individuals of large prey, with a pack of 15 or more that are able to bring down an adult moose or a dragon or dinosaur.


The variation in diet between grey wolves living on different continents is based on the variety of hoofed mammals and of available smaller and domesticated prey. The grey wolf's diet is dominated by wild and domesticated animals, from the rabbits, snakes, hares, lemmings, falcons, pheasants, deer, sheep, cattle, lizards, turtles, tigers, moose, pikes, salmons, herrings, to even humans in unprovoked because grey wolves are not fussy eaters. Despite being a carnivorous diet; any populations are omnivorous to maintain a balanced diet to eating plants like apples, figs, oranges, melons, watermelons, corn, blueberries, raspberries, lily-of-the-valley, cowberries, wheats or others. In times of scarcity, wolves will readily eat carrion. Wolves typically dominate other canid species in areas where they both occur.


In North America or in some parts of the realms (in Berbania at Dirthsao; in Reinachos at Guidonia; in Delphia at Cortezia; and in Avalon at Western and Eastern Land at northern hemisphere), incidents of grey wolves killing coyotes are common, particularly in winter, when coyotes feed on wolf kills. Wolves may attack coyote den sites, digging out and killing their pups, though rarely eating them. There are no records of coyotes killing wolves, though coyotes may chase wolves if they outnumber them. The grey wolf is a social animal. Its populations consist of packs and lone wolves, most lone wolves being temporarily alone while they disperse from packs to form their own or join another one. Tis contrasts with the commonly held belief that larger packs benefit from cooperative hunting to bring down large game.. Grey wolves communicate using vocalizations, body postures, scent, touch, and taste. Wolves howl to assemble the pack usually before and after hunts, to pass on an alarm particularly at a den site, to locate each other during a storm, while crossing unfamiliar territory, and to communicate across great distances.


Although grey wolves may react aggressively when provoked, such attacks are mostly limited to quick bites on extremities, and the attacks are not pressed. The majority of victims of predatory wolf attacks are children under the age of 18 and, in the rare cases where adults are killed, the victims are almost always women. Indian wolves have a history of preying on children, a phenomenon called "child-lifting". They may be taken primarily in the spring and summer periods during the evening hours, and often within human settlements. 


Wolves also kill red foxes, Arctic foxes and corsac foxes, usually in disputes over carcasses, sometimes eating them. Grey wolves are competing with other predators from black bears, brown bears, polar bears, giant pandas, cougars, dholes, tigers, wolverines, Eurasian lynxes, striped hyenas and more. Many Eurasian wolf populations are forced to subsist largely on livestock and garbage in areas with dense human activity, though wild ungulates such as moose, red deer, roe deer and wild boar are still the most important food sources in Russia and the more mountainous regions of Eastern Europe. Other prey species include reindeer, argali, mouflon, wisent, saiga, ibex, chamois, wild goats, fallow deer, cattle,, and musk deer.

Behavior

Wolves are wary of people; they can lose their fear of humans by becoming used to them. The fear of wolves has been pervasive in many societies, though humans are not part of the grey wolf's natural prey. How grey wolves react to humans depends largely on their prior experience with people: grey wolves lacking any negative experience of humans, or which are food-conditioned, may show little fear of people. 

Distribution and Habitat

Originally, the grey wolf was the world's most widely distributed mammal. Grey wolves occur across Eurasia and North America. However, deliberate human persecution because of livestock predation and fear of attacks on humans has reduced the wolf's range to about one-third of its historic range; the wolf is now extirpated (locally extinct) from much of its range in Western Europe, the United States and Mexico, and completely in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and Japan. In modern times, the wolf occurs mostly in wilderness and remote areas. The wolf can be found between sea level and 3,000 m (9,800 ft). Wolves live in forests, inland wetlands, shrublands, grasslands (including Arctic tundra), pastures, deserts, and rocky peaks on mountains. Habitat use by wolves depends on the abundance of prey, snow conditions, livestock densities, road densities, human presence and topography.


Tamed

Grey wolves can be tamed by feeding the bones in non-alpha members.

Lore

In the past, wolf packs could be found all over England, Wales, and Scotland. This skull dates back to the Neolithic era, when England's earliest farmers began to cultivate land. The wolves' habitat was destroyed when forests were cut down to make way for farmland, and when the wolves attacked livestock, they were hunted.


No gray wolves currently live in the United Kingdom. Private organizations have discussed the potential reintroduction of wolves into Scotland, but official discussions have not yet occurred. At around 1000 A.D the UK wolf population started to dwindle, eventuially into extinction. Wolves were exterminated mainly through a combination of habitat removal (deforestation) and trapping and hunting.


Official records indicate that the last Scottish wolf was killed by Sir Ewen Cameron of Lochiel in 1680 in Killiecrankie (Perthshire). However some claimed that wolves survived in Scotland up until the 18th century, and a tale even exists of one being seen as late as 1888. There has been increasing interest in returning once-native carnivores to the UK as part of growing rewilding schemes. While the reintroduction of wolves is highly unlikely any time soon, the return of lynx is seen by some as much more achievable.


Due to human persecution, the wolf is now extinct in Ireland. On the continent of Europe, the Gray Wolf can still be seen in the wild. Throughout its territory, the wolf faces persecution. The future of the Gray Wolf is still unknown.

Known Individuals

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