Wolf Trivia
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7correct to beat the crowd
This wolf trivia quiz has 118 free questions with answers and starts with the gray wolf itself: what a pack really is, why wolves howl (and why the Moon has nothing to do with it), how many teeth they carry, how fast they run and how much they can eat at one sitting. From there it moves through the subspecies and cousins that fill out the family tree - Arctic, Mexican and red wolves, the rodent-hunting Ethiopian wolf, and the dire wolf that split from the rest of the line millions of years ago. History and culture get their turn too: the 1995 return of wolves to Yellowstone and the trophic cascade that followed, the wandering wolf OR-7, the she-wolf of Rome, Fenrir and Týr, Little Red Riding Hood, Peter and the Wolf, and the zoo study that gave the world the 'alpha' myth. About a third of the questions are easy enough for a curious ten-year-old; the rest climb toward the detail only a wolf-watcher would know. Every answer has been checked against Wikipedia, the National Park Service's Yellowstone wolf data and the primary sources they cite, and each explanation adds one more thing worth knowing.
30 of 118 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What is the scientific name of the gray wolf?
Canis lupus
Canis lupus. Dozens of subspecies have been described, and one widely cited classification, disputed by some taxonomists, counts the dingo and the domestic dog among them.
Q 02The wolf is the largest living wild member of which animal family?
Canidae
Canidae. Of the dog family's roughly 40 wild species the wolf is the heavyweight, and that bulk goes with its speciality: tackling large prey as a team.
Q 03Wolves often join in a chorus of howls just before they do what?
Set off on a hunt
Set off on a hunt. The group howl rallies the pack, and the same call warns neighbouring wolves to keep away and helps separated members find each other.
Q 04A wild wolf pack is, at its core, what kind of group?
A mated pair and their offspring
A mated pair and their offspring. The young stay a year or two, sometimes longer, before leaving to found packs of their own, so a pack is a family, not a gang.
Q 05To save body heat in bitter cold, wolves let which part of the body cool to just above freezing?
Their footpads
Their footpads. Blood flow to the pads is controlled separately from the rest of the body, so they stay just warm enough not to freeze while losing as little heat as possible to the snow.
Q 06In what condition are wolf pups at birth?
Blind and deaf
Blind and deaf. Newborn wolf pups depend on their mother for warmth, and only at about three weeks old do they first venture out of the den.
Q 07A wolf's carnassial teeth strip meat from bone like which tool?
Scissors
Scissors. Among a wolf's 42 teeth, the carnassials' sharp edges slide past each other to shear flesh from bone, leaving the fangs to grip prey and the molars to crush.
Q 08Inside Yellowstone, where hunting is banned, what is the leading cause of death for wolves?
Other wolves
Other wolves. Packs defend their territories fiercely, and clashes between rival packs kill more of the park's wolves than anything else, while outside its borders people are the main cause of death.
Q 09Wolves can sprint at about 35 mph, but which gait carries them tirelessly across long distances?
A trot
A trot. Wolves cruise at roughly 5 mph for hours on end, their long legs and big feet built for distance, and save the sprint for short bursts after prey.
Q 10Which US law brought wolves back to Yellowstone?
Endangered Species Act
Endangered Species Act. It obliged the government to restore lost species where possible, so 14 wolves were brought in and penned for ten weeks, because wolves freed at once tend to head for home.
Q 11Yellowstone's first reintroduced wolves were captured in 1995 in which province?
Alberta
Alberta. The 14 wolves were caught near Hinton, east of Jasper National Park, a spot chosen because its rugged, forested terrain and its prey resembled Yellowstone's.
Q 12In Roman legend, which twins were suckled by a she-wolf?
Romulus and Remus
Romulus and Remus. King Amulius ordered the infant twins killed, but they survived on the bank of the Tiber, where the she-wolf nursed them until a herdsman found them.
Q 13In Norse mythology, the giant wolf Fenrir is fated to swallow which god at Ragnarök?
Odin
Odin. His son Víðarr avenges him at once, in one telling by planting a foot on the wolf's lower jaw and tearing its mouth apart, in another by stabbing it to the heart.
Q 21About how many gray wolves live in the wild worldwide?
200,000
200,000. Estimates run from 200,000 to 250,000, most of them in the remote north, after the wolf was wiped out across much of western Europe, Mexico and the United States.
Q 22Although wolves were wiped out across much of western Europe and the United States, how does the IUCN rate the species worldwide?
Least Concern
Least Concern. The wolf's vast range and stable global numbers keep it out of every threatened category, although some regional populations, such as those in parts of Europe, are seriously threatened.
Q 23Besides howling, how do wolf packs mainly advertise the edges of their territory?
Scent marks
Q 14Which Norse god lost a hand after placing it in Fenrir's mouth as a pledge?
Týr
Týr. The gods were tricking Fenrir into a magic chain while pretending it was sport, and when the bound wolf realised he had been trapped, he bit off the hand Týr had offered.
Q 15Which French author published the first written version of Little Red Riding Hood in 1697?
Charles Perrault
Charles Perrault. His tale has no rescue: the wolf eats the girl and a closing moral warns young ladies against charming strangers, while the hunter who saves her arrived later with the Brothers Grimm.
Q 16In The Three Little Pigs, what is the one house the Big Bad Wolf cannot blow down made of?
Bricks
Bricks. In Joseph Jacobs's 1890 telling the wolf eats the first two pigs, then tries the brick house's chimney, falls into a pot of boiling water and ends up as the third pig's supper.
Q 17'The Boy Who Cried Wolf' is traditionally credited to which storyteller?
Aesop
Aesop. In his fable a shepherd boy raises so many false alarms that when a wolf really attacks the flock nobody comes, which is where the phrase 'to cry wolf' comes from.
Q 18In Prokofiev's Peter and the Wolf, which instruments represent the wolf?
Three horns
Three horns. Prokofiev wrote the piece for a Moscow children's theatre and gave every character its own instrument, so young listeners learn to tell the flute's bird from the oboe's duck and the clarinet's cat.
Q 19Arctic wolves of the High Arctic islands mainly hunt Arctic hares and which large animal?
Muskoxen
Muskoxen. Wolves this far north have almost never been hunted, so instead of fleeing they tend to stand and stare at the rare humans they meet, and some even come closer for a look.
Q 20The rare Ethiopian wolf, found only in the country's high mountains, is a specialist hunter of what?
Rodents
Rodents. Although it lives in packs, it hunts alone by day, pouncing on the giant mole-rats and grass rats of Ethiopia's high grasslands.
Scent marks. Wolves spray urine along their trails, and like a howl the marks warn neighbouring packs not to intrude, but they keep working long after the sound has died away.
Q 24Who killed Yellowstone's last known wolves in 1926?
Park rangers
Park rangers. At least 136 wolves were killed inside the park between 1914 and 1926 as official predator control, ending with two pups that rangers found near Soda Butte Creek.
Q 25Which smaller predator became scarcer inside Yellowstone's wolf territories soon after the wolves returned?
Coyote
Coyote. Wolves treat their smaller relatives as rivals and kill them around carcasses, and with fewer coyotes about, foxes and birds of prey may have benefited.
Q 26Which animal is the favoured prey of Yellowstone's wolves?
Elk
Elk. They make up about nine in ten of the wolves' winter kills, and each wolf takes around 20 a year, well above the 12 that planners predicted before the reintroduction.
Q 27The chain of ecosystem changes set off by returning wolves to Yellowstone is a textbook example of what?
A trophic cascade
A trophic cascade. The term describes a change at the top of a food chain rippling down through every level below it, as may have happened where streamside willow and aspen began to recover.
Q 28In Yellowstone, which animal regularly drives wolves off the carcasses of their own kills?
Grizzly bear
Grizzly bear. Against predictions, grizzlies take over wolf kills almost at will, which has turned the carcasses into an important food supply for bears in lean years.
Q 29In 2011 the collared wolf OR-7, 'Journey', became the first wild wolf confirmed in which US state since 1924?
California
California. OR-7 left his pack in northeastern Oregon and wandered more than 1,000 miles, crossing the state line in late December 2011 before finally settling down with a mate back in Oregon.
Q 30Captive-bred red wolves were released in 1987 at the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in which state?
North Carolina
North Carolina. The red wolf had been declared extinct in the wild in 1980, and this release began a comeback: more than 60 zoo-bred adults were freed there by 1994, and they soon formed packs and bred.