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Wolverine

Gulo gulo · medium

A wolverine weighs less than a medium dog and behaves as though it weighs considerably more. It is the largest land-dwelling member of the weasel family, and it is best known for taking carcasses from animals far bigger than itself — bears and wolf packs have been recorded giving ground rather than continuing an argument with one.

Most of its diet is scavenged. A wolverine covers enormous distances, sometimes hundreds of kilometres, working a home range in search of winter-killed carrion, and its jaws and teeth are strong enough to crack frozen bone. What it cannot eat it caches, wedging food into rock crevices and snow where the cold preserves it.

That caching habit ties the species to snow in a way that matters now. Females also den in deep spring snowpack, and both the den and the larder depend on it lasting. Where snow cover is thinning and retreating uphill, wolverine range appears to be contracting with it.

They live at low density in boreal forest and alpine tundra across northern Eurasia and North America, are solitary except when breeding, and are seen so rarely that much of what is known comes from tracks and remote cameras.

Where it lives

Worml lists the wolverine as native to 7 countries — Canada, Finland, Mongolia, Norway, Russia, Sweden and United States. Its habitat is boreal forest, taiga and alpine tundra.

Ranges here are reduced to whole countries for playability and exclude introduced populations — see about the data for what that simplification leaves out.

In the game

Wolverine is rated medium. To solve the round you need to find any 4 of its 7 listed countries. How scoring works →

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