Identifying individual wild Eastern grey wolves (Canis lupus lycaon) using fundamental frequency and amplitude of howls

What is it about?

We explored the way that wolves encoded their individual identities in their howls in both the fundamental frequency, effectively the pitch, and the loudness, or amplitude. We developed a special code for the program Matlab to do this. We achieved 100% individual identification for the wolves and suggest it could be used as a survey method in the wild.

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Why is it important?

Our findings show that wolves have highly individual howls and that there is more information that is encoded that can be decoded with fine scale analyses.