Albert

The image above is of Albert.

Albert was a St. John’s water dog who was actually born in Newfoundland.

He was among the last of his breed. Well, he was among the last of the lines that were free of modern Labrador retriever blood.

And he had a famous owner.

This particular dog belonged to Farley Mowat, a well-known Canadian naturalist and author.

The above photo comes from Bay of Spirits, Mowat’s memoir about his time falling in love with Newfoundland– and then having a very bad falling out with it.

Albert is described as follows:

Perhaps the most momentous event that winter was the aquisition of Albert, a young water dog from La Poille. As big as a Labrador retriever, he was a sway-backed creature, black as ebony except for his white chest, and equipped with webbed feet, the tail of an otter, and the attitude of a lord of the realm. He quickly became an integral member of our little family both ashore and afloat, where he demonstrated he was a proper seadog: sure-footed, ready for anything, and afraid of nothing (pg. 303).

“La Poille” is on Newfoundland’s Sou’west Coast. It is normally spelled “La Poile,” and it is not very far from Burgeo, where Mowat lived from 1962 until about 1968.  Albert would later be featured in an episode of the the CBC series Telescope in 1970.

By then, the Mowats had taken to summering on Quebec’s Magdalen Isands, which are located in the Gulf of St. Lawrence. In the film, Albert and his mate– aptly named Vickie– are shown retrieving from the surf. Albert also receives a bizarre bedtime story from his master, which would give any dog nightmares!

Mowat tried to use Albert as a way of saving his breed.

Mowat believed the water dog of Newfoundland was closely related to the Portuguese water dog, a linkage that, thus far, hasn’t been revealed in any genetic studies.  Like many breed historians, Mowat tried to trace these water dogs through their poodle lineage, eventually arriving at herding dogs that were native to Central Asia. These linkages have not been confirmed in any genetic studies, but they are still pretty interesting.

In order to save the breed, Mowat tried breeding Albert to a Labrador, but because none of the puppies had the characteristic white spots, he abandoned the project.  There were only four pups in the litter, and both bitch pups died.   The two dog pups were given to Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau and Soviet Premier Alexei Kosygin.

These dogs were multipurpose hauling, hunting, and fishing dogs.

They are primary ancestor of all the retrievers, except the Nova Scotia duck-tolling retriever, which may have a bit of this blood. However, it is mostly of collie extraction.  All the others, including the large Newfoundland dog and its variants, are derived from variation upon this landrace.

There still are black retriever-type dogs in Newfoundland, but these dogs heavily outcrossed to modern Labrador retriever lines, which were introduced from North America and the United Kingdom as “improved” hunting dogs.

When people say that Labrador retrievers come from Newfoundland, they aren’t exactly wrong. However, all the larger retrievers descend from this stock, and the modern Labrador retriever was developed in the United Kingdom in the 1880′s.

The dogs are derived from animals from Newfoundland, but the “improvement” happened in the United Kingdom and on Chesapeake Bay.

Albert is an idea of what a dog from this landrace looked like– at least what the last of his kind looked like.

One can create a dog that looks very much like him if one crosses a Labrador retriever with a border collie.

But the cross is  an imposter.

Albert’s kind was developed on the land and on the sea.

Natural and artificial selection honed his kind.

A dog derived from the cross of a border collie and a Labrador retriever never experienced those generations of selection.

It would just look the same.

Nothing more.

 

 

 

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Arkansas wolf, 1929

This photograph is of a wolf trapped near Gillham, Arkansas in 1929.

The photo can be found in the National Archives in Washington, D.C, and it also appears in Bruce Hampton’s The Great American Wolf, which is history of the wolf in North America.  It came out in 1997, just a few years after wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone.

The caption under this photo in Hampton’s text says that this animal was a “red wolf” that was captured in Arkansas in 1929. The area listed in the caption is in the  Ouachita Mountains, which stretch from western Arkansas to southeastern Oklahoma.

This animal had been captured, and then someone had bound its jaws shut with wire. Often, the dogs would be set on wolves in this particular position. On other occasions, they would turn the wolves loose and let them die of dehydration or hyperthermia.

This particular animal is of interest because it is a photo of what is reported to have been a red wolf.

However, it has none of the coyote-type features we associate with the creatures we call “red wolves” today. It has a broad muzzle, just like we see in other wolves, and its ears are relatively small. The skull is also broader and rounded, just as we normally see in wolves of other subspecies.

This animal may have been red in color, but its phenotype suggests that it was all or mostly wolf– unlike modern red wolves, which look like slightly larger coyotes and, indeed, are almost entirely of that ancestry.

This wolf is not too different from the one that Audubon and Bachman described as the “Red Texan wolf.”

This subspecies of wolf no longer exists, so we really can’t say much about it. It’s likely been absorbed into coyotes by now.   The so-called modern red wolves are coyotes that have likely also absorbed a very similar wolf in Louisiana and East Texas. They just happen to have a bit more wolf in them than normal coyotes that have absorbed similar wolf populations.

Sir Edwin Landseer with a Sussex spaniel

This image comes comes from a painting by Abraham Cooper in the early to middle part of the nineteenth century.  I would estimate that this painting was done in the 1830′s.  Sir Edwin Landseer, the man kneeling before the spaniel on the right, looks to be in his early 30′s.

The only copy of this image I can find is in James Watson’s  The Dog Book (1906).

The spaniel that is facing Landseer– and the likely retriever of the woodcock he is holding– is a Sussex spaniel

And it is very much unlike a Sussex spaniel of the modern era.  It is also post Rosehill-breeding, which suggests that even after Mr. Fuller established his strain, these dogs were often longer leg than they became as show dogs.

 

Giraffes and lumpers and splitters

Let me ask you a very simple question:

How many species of giraffe are there?

I bet the vast majority of you would say:  ”Just one.”

A few might point out that next closest relative to the giraffe is the okapi, which looks like something created in gene splicing lab, and a few others might mention that most taxonomists believe the pronghorn is a close relative of the giraffe and the okapi.

But I bet that very few of you would say that there are multiple species of giraffe– unless you’ve seen this study.

Yeah. It turns out that when we examine the mtDNA and certain microsatellite markers, there are likely several species of giraffe.

But we have historically believed that there is just one species.

But this study found that there are 11 genetically distinct populations of giraffe, but six of these are fairly close to being separate species– and might very well be. (This same methodology found that there were two species of clouded leopard and two species of elephant in Africa that are quite genetically distinct from each other.)

These six populations had virtually no evidence of interbreeding. Masai giraffes, reticulated, and Rothschild’s giraffes live in roughly the same area, but they are reproductively isolated from each other.

Further, as much as 1.5 million years of evolution may be separating them.

Now, more genetic studies need to be performed on giraffes. These types of studies can be in error, but if we look at more of the genome and have more samples in the studies, we will get a better understanding of how giraffes evolved.

The evidence is pretty good that the classical classification of only a single species of giraffe might very well be in error.

This study raises some important questions for how we approach taxonomy.

Some people really like to split up related populations into species, even if we have lots of evidence of a gene flow between populations. These people are called “splitters.”

Others prefer to group related populations together within a single species, especially if there is evidence of a considerable gene flow between them. These people are called “lumpers.”

Historically, it was to a naturalist or explorer’s advantage to define something as a new species.

I have never been able to keep track of all the potential bear species that have been cataloged. Most of these fit nicely into the brown bear species, but in the nineteenth century, any number of bears could be deemed a unique species solely on the vanity and caprice of the person documenting them.

Now, we have a whole host of tools to help us see how species are related.

Traditionally, morphology was used to determine taxonomy and phylogenetic relationships, but now we are using various assays of DNA to make these judgments.

We’ve seen the validity of some potential species collapse under these analyses,  the red wolf and the Eastern wolf are two that have fallen, as has the golden moon bear of Southeast Asia. A gold-colored phase of the Asiatic black bear (“moon bear”) was proposed as a new species, but it was found to be nothing more than a golden Asiatic black bear.

We’ve also seen the validity of certain species confirmed, like the kouprey of Cambodia, which was once claimed to be nothing more than a hybrid between banteng and an indicus cattle.  A mitochondrial DNA study found that kouprey and Cambodian banteng had very similar mtDNA– which led to this particular speculation.  But a study that included a larger sample of banteng mtDNA and as well as some nuclear DNA markers revealed that at least one kouprey cow wound up intermixing with the banteng in Cambodia during the Pleistocene. Virtually all banteng from Cambodia have kouprey mtDNA.

What’s particularly interesting is the researchers who were claiming that the kouprey was hybrid dropped the nonsense almost instantly after being shown what the nuclear DNA studies revealed.  That’s how science is supposed to work. If a hypothesis is falsified, you’re supposed to accept it as being in error and not true.

For the proposed red and Eastern wolf species, researchers and people who should generally know better keep promoting both of them and also entertain denial that the genome-wide analysis that was performed on wolves and coyotes found anything uself– which was more extensive than any of these other studies that have proven very useful in determining species status.

There is more evidence that there are multiple species of giraffe in Africa than there is evidence of multiple species of wolf in North America, yet the taxonomy of giraffes has not been changed in any official capacity. And the same goes for the several species of wolf in North America.  A wolf with some coyote ancestry is called a unique species of Eastern wolf, even though its mate is a pure wolf, but a Rothschild’s giraffe and a masai giraffe are the same species, even if they will not mate with each other at all.

How weird is that!

 

 

 

How the introduction of a large predator can dramatically change an ecosystem

Burmese pythons are now established in several parts of Florida, including Everglades National Park.

These large constrictors have been kept as pets for decades in the United States. In most parts of the country, they simply cannot survive the winter.

I remember hearing the story of a local guy who was working for a company that was putting a water line in a rural part of West Virginia. As he was helping lay out where the line was supposed to go, he came across a skeleton. A big skeleton!

It turned to be that of a huge snake– maybe 8 or 9 feet long.

After doing some research on the internet, he realized he had come across the remains of a Burmese python that someone had either released into the wild or escaped to make its own fortune in the wild.  Too bad it was running loose in a place with a humid continental climate, and it didn’t last very long.

Florida, unlike West  Virginia, has the perfect climate for this species. It is native to Southeast Asia and Southern China, which are places that have a climate that is somewhat similar to that of much of Florida.

So if a Burmese python gets loose around here, it won’t last long, but if it gets loose in Florida, it might as well have been released into its native habitat.

And that’s why Burmese pythons have thrived in parts of Florida.

The problem is that Florida isn’t their native habitat.

And their residency in a national park certainly hasn’t gone unnoticed.

It was assumed that these snakes were causing real problems with the ecosystem, but no one had been able to quantify how much they have affected other species.

Well, a study was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America last winter that actually quantified the effects of Burmese python predation.

The authors simply made a comparison between roadkill surveys from the period before and after the year 2000. From 2003-2011, there was a massive drop-off of certain species.

There was a 99.3% decrease in raccoon observations.  A 98.9 percent decrease in opossum observations was detected over those years, and an 87.5% decrease in observations of bobcats. No rabbits were detected at all during these years.

Now, it might be a bit of a stretch to blame the pythons for the decrease in every species.

But all of these animals are potential python prey, and if pythons are on the increase, they would be major predators of these animals.

Raccoons and bobcats have only alligators to worry about under normal circumstances. Alligators are restricted in where they live. It is almost unheard of for an alligator to run something down on land and kill it.

However, pythons can hunt over a much broader area, and they are more of a problem for these animals than alligators would normally be.

Now, raccoons, bobcats (at least the small Florida subspecies), and opossums are mesopredators. They generally tend to prey upon smaller species, like songbirds.

It is possible that Burmese pythons might be having a positive impact on songbirds.  An adult Burmese python isn’t going to waste time hunting birds– but the younger ones might.

So there may not be a benefit from Burmese pythons controlling mesopredator release.

Plus, there are other introduced species in the park besides Burmese pythons. Some, like black rats and feral cats, are much more of a problem for songbirds than these mesopredators.

But the Burmese python would also kill them.

So it gets a bit complicated.

But these study does show that Burmese pythons could be implicated in massive population drops in certain native species.

And we should be concerned.

 

 

 

The Afghan hounds that weren’t

This image comes from a piece in the Afghan Hound Times.

All the historical information comes from Jess Ruffner, who has the DesertWindHounds blog.

Apparently some Afghan hound sources counted two dogs, Khelat and Kushki, as Afghan hounds.

They were nothing of the sort.

They were both dogs that we’d recognize as Central Asian ovtcharkas. No description of Kushki is given– other than the dog was creamy white.

But Khelat appears to be an ovtcharka with a twist– a shaggy, poodle-type coat.

These dogs were imported to England in the 1880′s, but a more Ovtcharka-looking dog named “Shere Ali” was exhibited at Crufts in 1879– right in the middle of the Second Afghan War.