Yellowstone Cougars Vs. Wolves: What Tension You Might Not Know

When one predator scores a meal, another might just swoop in to take it. Yellowstone's cougars and wolves are locked in this brutal dance.

THE CHANGES IN DIETS AND BEHAVIOR

My friend Brett French, Outdoor Editor for the Billings Gazette,  prefaced a fascinating account with a simple fact: "In Yellowstone National Park, the reason cats and canines don’t get along is simple — wolves will kill cougars and steal their food."

Brett pointed to a  recently published study that utilized GPS collar data collected over nine years. The study found that interactions between the two predators often revolved around elk.

RELUCTANT "SHARING"

Elk are a big animal, averaging between 500 and 700 pounds. So when a cougar kills an elk it can take days to devour that much meat.

Should a pack of wolves walk nearby and catch scent of the kill site, they will chase off the cougar, and even kill the big cat if possible, to claim the meat. Strangely, wolves won’t eat the cougar they kill and cougars avoided animals that wolves had killed.

ENEMIES WITHOUT BENEFITS

This behavior is different than it is among smaller predators, such as coyotes and foxes, which will scavenge larger predators’ prey. In the cougar’s case, researchers said their dynamic is “enemies without benefits,” as opposed to the smaller predators which may be killed by wolves, but also get a lot of food from their prey.

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OREGON STATE UNIVERSITY FINDINGS

This new study builds on decades of research showing that wolves dominate interactions because they live in packs, while cougars are solitary, according to an Oregon State news release. Previous studies have demonstrated how subordinate carnivores exhibit a tradeoff with dominant carnivores; they suffer mortalities but also benefit from scavenging their kills. Yet cougars seldom scavenge other carnivore kills and are instead efficient hunters themselves.

If you find wildlife interactions among predators interesting, you will definitely want to gather more from Brett French's article here.