Given this designation, it's easy to imagine that a pack consists of young adults and older animals in a strict ranking system. You can imagine that relatives, newcomers and challengers are all part of the system. Maybe some of these wolves might challenge the alpha male to take over leadership of the pack?

On the Howstuffworks website, for example, you can read that wolves follow "an incredibly sophisticated group hierarchy," and that wolves naturally organize themselves in packs for stability and to help each other with hunting.

The pack structure is said to include a "beta wolf" who is the deputy and the "omega wolf" who is at the bottom of the rank, and often the victim of bullying.

In reality, wolf packs are usually much less complicated.

Doesn't work for wolves in the wild

Calling wolves alpha and beta animals comes from research on wolves in captivity, says Barbara Zimmermann.

Zimmermann is a professor at Inland Norway University of Applied Sciences who studies wolves.

"The leader is called the alpha male. Then there may be several rank levels, beta, gamma and so on. But this is not a concept that works for wolves in the wild," she says.