Wolf colony:
Among the many things I would like to see would be a population of mammals to be followed over a long time with excellent observation and assurance that mating would be random. It almost happened. (Sebastian J. Schreiber Mathematical Dances with Wolves SCIENCE vol. 334 no. 6060 December 2, 2011 page 1214 and Tim Coulson et al. Modeling Effects of Environmental Change on Wolf Population Dynamics, Trait Evolution, and Life History SCIENCE vol. 334 no. 6060 December 2, 2011 page 1275)
Grey wolves were reintroduced into Yellowstone Park. They have been meticulously monitored particularly with respect to things like fertility, growth rate, coat color and adult size and a sophisticated mathematical description has been done and is ongoing.
The number of wolves has risen to 1651, which should be ample to manifest any effect of population size on fertility.
The study is directed toward analyzing the effect of environmental changes on the wolves. But careful statistical analysis has a way of dropping our correlations that were not expected. So the effect would probably be discovered.
However wolves live in packs. They are not in a random mating population of that size. And of course there is no interest in assuring that they do mate at random. That would, on present evidence, not be doing the wolves a favor, and everybody is pulling for the wolves to flourish.
Two out of three is pretty good, but as presently constructed the study will never prove an instance of excessive social pool size leading to a population crash. Besides, wolves live a long time. By the time five or ten wolf generations go by the present issue will have been resolved one way or the other. We shall have survived or not.
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