A Bath woman has helped to develop technology that identifies individual wolves by their howls.
Former Prior Park pupil Holly Root-Gutteridge has led research at Nottingham Trent University to crack a wolf's calling code.
The team has developed a computer programme to analyse the vocal signatures of eastern grey wolves with 100 per cent accuracy.
The computer programme – a kind of vocal recognition for wolves – could prove vital in conservation when culls are imposed because animal populations become too high.
"If you have seen a thriller film where they walk up to a computer and say a code word and the computer recognises their voice – that is what we're trying to recreate for wolves," she said.
"At the moment it is really hard to find wolves in the wild, they are really scared of people and if they hear them they will run away – they are very elusive.
"They also have big home ranges of 500 square miles and they could be anywhere, so we need to be able to find them."
Until now scientists have tracked wolves by snow tracking – simply observing their tracks – or by capturing them and attaching GPS equipment before they are released.
The computer programme analyses both pitch and volume.
Holly said: "It's a bit like language. If you put the stress in different places, you form a different sound.
"In scientific terms this is really exciting, because it means that if we hear a howl on one night we can tell if it is or isn't the same wolf you hear on subsequent nights."
The scientists put their new tool to the test by studying dozens of archive recordings of wild eastern grey wolf howls, living mainly in Algonquin Park, Canada, and collected by the British Library in London.
They were able to achieve a 100 per cent success rate in recognising individual wolves from their solo howls.
The team's findings are published in the journal Bioacoustics.
