#curious about how the association with leshens might work here

[laurelnose]

(1/2) Hey socks, I love your occasional biology rants on the Witcher 'verse, so you might be the right person to bounce this thought off of: Having recently finished Wild Hunt the biology nerd in me can’t stop thinking about the sheer amount of wolves in the game.

 (2/2) So, what are these wolves eating other than the occasional villager? The answer has to be either mostly cannibalism (not sustainable) or monsters. Which is why I present: The wolves in the Witcher universe have learned to take down less intelligent monsters like drowners, nekkers, ghouls or rotfiends due to a lack of natural prey animals.

!!! fuck yes!

tho first: from your mention of “lack of natural prey animals” i assume this is less about the number of wolves and more about the fact that TW3 leaves out basically all of the large herbivores that would have existed at the time, lmao. 

IRL, most countries in Europe have at least two to three native deer species (roe, fallow, and red). other big herbivores native to Europe and staple in the gray wolf diet are moose, caribou, and European bison. recently-extinct/extirpated herbivores that would have been extant in the middle ages include the aurochs, tarpan, saiga antelope, and sometimes pyrenean ibex*. also wild boar, which are omnivores but very edible. hare, rabbit, and European beaver are also fair prey for a wolf. wolves are opportunists with diverse diets, and Europe’s faunal assemblage supports that! 

meanwhile, in-game, you’ve got feral goats in Skellige, wild boar in HoS, one species of rabbit, and... one species of deer. and there aren’t even that many of the deer.

obviously modeling a functioning ecosystem is low on the list of priorities for a game dev, but from an ecological perspective this is INSANE. the Continent having only one cervid species, let alone only one large herbivore period, is absurd. the rule of thumb is each time you step up a trophic level in a food web, biomass decreases by a factor of ten—very simplistically, if you have 100 plants, you can have 10 deer and 1 wolf. there is no sustainable ecological scenario where eating monsters could compensate for the complete absence of a dozen or more species of herbivorous megafauna, especially when many of those monsters are on the same trophic level as wolves, and especially if we are also trying to explain a disproportionately large wolf population**. 

thus i have to assume that the biggest part of the answer to “what are the wolves eating” is: there is no lack of natural prey items, the usual historical assemblage of big European herbivores are present and in abundance! you just don’t see them in the same way you don’t see Geralt traveling the full distance between Redania and Skellige. the single deer species we see is metaphorical for everything else that should also be hanging around. the alternative is total ecosystem collapse.

THAT SAID, wolves are absolutely also eating monsters!! wolves are opportunists, and if the Continent gives them the opportunity to eat monsters...well! nekkers i think might be a toss-up: i can totally picture wolves digging them out of places, but i can also picture a big enough nekker horde overwhelming a wolf pack, so that one’s probably situational. but ghouls and drowners absolutely oh my god. (sirens harassing coastal wolves for their kills like corvids??) particularly, wolf kill sites attract lots of smaller carnivores and scavengers like coyotes and foxes—and when wolves return to kill sites, they’ll kill smaller carnivores they find there (and sometimes eat them). wolves partially controlling necrophage populations by hunting them when they’re drawn to kill sites! (on the flip side, wolves are heavily risk-averse and will usually abandon kills to bears rather than defend; wolves on the Continent may be feeding on monsters but they’re probably also feeding monsters by having to abandon kills to big monsters like draconids. kleptoparasitic draconids!!!) (on the flip flip side, both wolves and bears will go after babies of the other species, and while a grown griffin could easily dominate a wolf kill site, little griffins (grifflets? grifflings? chicks?) probably have to be real careful about all the large predators stalking around the Continent.)

i am 98% sure anything that eats a rotfiend dies though.

* speaking of Iberian/Pyrenean ibexes—it’s off-topic because usually most wolf populations can’t get to them for the altitude, but Europe’s mountains are home to alpine ibex, Iberian ibex, and chamois, and there is no way that a) there aren’t similar populations in the witcherverse and b) mountain-dwelling draconids and harpies are not eating them!

** modern perspectives on how many wolves a healthy ecosystem can/should support are significantly skewed, and afaik we don’t have good numbers for what European wolf populations were like in the middle ages (historical ecology is very difficult and gets more difficult the further back you go). i found one source suggesting France alone had about 10,000 to 15,000 wolves before the 19th century—after about 400 years of state-sponsored efforts to hunt them all down. that’s a lot of wolves! the scale of TW3’s geography is fucky because it’s a video game, but i’m not necessarily convinced that the Continent’s wolf population is super inflated—at least, assuming that the large herbivores they should be eating do in fact exist. probably isn’t a hill i would die on one way or the other, just a thought worth considering!