Early one morning last week, before visitors arrived at the International Wolf Center in Ely, staff members released two small, black, fuzzy wolf pups into a fenced outdoor yard — the site of an unusual science experiment.
Propped up inside the pen stood a mirror, about 4-feet tall. The 3-month-old pups, named Cedar and Rowan, bounded over to it, yelping.
All the while, Matheus de Mesquita Silveira, a Brazilian researcher, stood nearby, filming their every move.
“They are testing the mirror,” he later explained. “Like, ‘what’s going on? Can I cross? Can I not cross?’”
The pups were curious, but they were largely indifferent to the reflections of themselves they saw in the mirror. They didn’t exhibit any social reactions, such as fear or anxiety.
“So they do not invite the image to play with them, or show submission to the image. That shows us that they are not seeing that as another wolf,” Silveira said.
This is the third generation of pups at the Ely wolf center that Silveira has studied to see how they respond to their reflections.
There aren’t any wolves in Brazil, but he’s been fascinated by them ever since he was a kid when he saw a National Geographic documentary.
He’s one of two scientists working with the new pups this year. The other is Kathryn Lord, a researcher at the Chan Medical School at the University of Massachusetts, who studies the evolution and development of behavior in dogs and wolves.
One of the big differences between them is that wolves are “neophobic” — they’re fearful of anything new, and much more so than dogs. Lord believes that trait could be linked to when they start walking. Wolves start walking a couple weeks earlier than dogs, before they can even see and hear.
Lord is trying to figure out precisely when that happens.
“Which sounds kind of easy, like, just look at them and see when they’re walking,” she said. But in reality, it’s much more difficult.
“We can’t just write down, ‘Cedar is walking today,’” Lord said. “Because we don’t know if he started walking that day, or he probably was doing it the night before or the day before, but we just didn’t see it.”
What they needed was a way to quantify it. So she worked with the International Wolf Center to outfit Cedar and Rowan with devices called accelerometers, devices that measure their movement, similar to what’s in a smart watch or a Fitbit. Then they attached them to tiny backpacks the pups wore.
It’s difficult to find wolf pups to do this kind of research, Lord said.
“We’re looking for places that are doing a really fantastic job, raising their pups, socializing their pups for living in captivity. And the International Wolf Center is one of the premier places,” she said.
In charge of that socialization at the Ely International Wolf Center is wolf curator Giselle Narváez Rivera. Her work begins when the wolf pups are still tiny, only about 10 days old. Rivera said she was with them when they first opened their eyes.
“And that first thing that they’ll see is us caring for them, bottle feeding. And so that relationship that they develop with us starts really young,” Rivera said.
In her two-and-a-half years at the wolf center, this was Rivera’s first time working with a newborn litter of pups.
“So it was pretty special to be there and see them howl for the first time,” she said.