What is it about?
Urbanization is thought to shape animal behaviour. For the first time, we experimentally tested a large sample of wild wolves along an urbanization gradient, exposing them to novel objects and human-voice playbacks to investigate how urban living alters wolves’ fear responses to human-related cues.
Featured Image
Photo by Federico Di Dio photography on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Our results reveal a complex behavioral response in wolves from more urbanized areas: reduced neophobia toward a novel object, but increased caution when the original object was replaced with a slightly different one, suggesting heightened sensitivity to subtle changes. In contrast, human voices consistently elicited strong fear across the entire urbanization gradient, indicating that wolves remain highly wary of direct human cues. Together, these responses may promote exploration of human-dominated landscapes while limiting the potential costs these environments entail, highlighting wolves’ capacity to navigate urbanized areas.
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Wolves respond differently to human cues as they expand into urban landscapes, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, February 2026, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,
DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2529810123.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
