Long-time readers of this blog know that I have long been skeptical of the classification of the red wolf as a distinct species.
Because this animal is rather large and hunts in packs and because it closely resembles the primitive pallipes wolf of the Middle East and India, I guessed that it was an early offshoot of the Canis lupus species. I never bought into the oft-promoted theory that this wolf was a primitive wolf that represented an even more ancient origin that the Canis mosbachensis and Canis lupus lineage of the Old World.
This theory, promoted by Ron Nowak and popularized throughout the wildlife conservation world (including the US Fish and Wildlife Service), holds that the red wolf is a derivative of Canis edwardii, an early North American member of the genus Canis that was roughly similar to the red wolf in size and general distribution. Nowak performed any number of skull measurements to prove his thesis. Anyone familiar with dog and wolf anatomy knows are actually among the most variable features within a population. Everyone has seen litters of dogs in which littermates have different head shapes. Even in purebred litters, one can see puppies that have quite a bit of variance in head-type. For this reason, many conformation breeders of so-called “head breeds” have a very hard time fixing a consistent head within their lines. This variance in head shape also occurs in wolves, which is one reason why the Goyet cave “dog” is so disputed. Is its short muzzle the result of domestication or natural variance within a wolf population?
Another factor drove me to question the red wolf’s validity as a species. I greatly enjoyed Bruce Hampton’s The Great American Wolf, which is a history of man’s extermination of wolves on this continent. On page 166, Hampton provides an image of red wolf that was trapped in 1929 at Gillham, Arkansas. The wolf’s jaws were bound with wire. It was then tied up to a stake to meet its fate. Either the dogs were going to be set upon it, or it was going to be left tied up to die from dehydration. Unfortunately, this image is not available in the preview, but what struck me about it is that this wolf looked nothing like the creatures that are claimed to be red wolves now. The animal had smaller ears and a broader muzzle– much like one would expect in an Iranian wolf or Spanish wolf. It was nothing like a coyote.
The ones I’ve seen in zoos have all had very strong coyote features– large ears and a narrower muzzle– but those same features can also been seen in Indian wolves, which are thought to be among the most ancient of extant wolf lineages. Although I had skepticism about the Canis edwardii theory, I was more willing to accept that the red wolf was somehow related to the Indian wolf, for both would be very similar to the old primitive Canis lupus wolves from which the entire Holarctic wolf species descends.
The original mtDNA studies performed by Dr.Robert Wayne of UCLA found that all the red wolves in his samples had coyote or “gray wolf” mtDNA sequences. The majority of had coyote mtDNA. The wolves of Minnesota and Quebec also had coyote mtDNA, which Wayne contended came from hybridization with coyotes. This finding caused an uproar in wolf conservation circles. This particular finding came out just seven years after the first red wolves were released into the Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge in North Carolina. The US Fish and Wildlife Service was investing heavily in ensuring that his population thrived and remained free from the taint of coyote blood. Even now, much the work in red wolf conservation is trapping coyotes in red wolf range. For some reason, the released red wolves and the colonizing coyotes just loved each other.
Wayne was not popular in the red wolf conservation community. Nowak wrote a rebuttal to Wayne in which his biggest argument is that there never were any coyotes in the eastern part of North America. Then Wilson released several comparative studies of red wolves and those of Algonquin Park in Ontario. These Algonquin Park wolves were main study population of John and Mary Theberge. These were smaller, more “coyote-like” wolves, that had come to specialize on hunting beavers in their native range. Because of their appearance and because they were thought to have coyote mtDNA, Paul Wilson’s team decided to compare microsatellites in the DNA of Algonquin wolves, red wolves, coyotes, and Western “gray” wolves. The Algonquin and red wolves were found to have a divergent lineage from either Western “gray” wolves and coyotes. Those findings appeared to vindicate Nowak’s morphological studies that showed the red wolf to be part of an ancient North American lineage of wolf that derived from Canis edwardii (or something wholly North American), not Canis mosbachensis or Canis lupus.
I thought the microsatellite finding was still unconvincing. Perhaps these wolves were derived from a very early offshoot of Canis mosbachensis or early Canis lupus that invaded North America before the main Holarctic wolf lineages had developed.
I was waiting for something more.
Well, something more has just been released. Robert Wayne’s team at UCLA has been working on wolf genomes. Last year, UCLA researchers found that the Middle Eastern wolf populations were a greater source for diversity in domestic dog genes than any other wolf population– which suggested that dogs were first domesticated in the Middle East. This finding very strongly contradicted a comparison of many, many dog and wolf mtDNA sequences by Peter Savolainen of the Royal Institute of Technology at Stockholm, Sweden, which found that dogs were first domesticated in East Asia. Greater diversity of lineages was found in that region, and it is accepted that one generally finds more diversity in mtDNA lineages at the point of origin. (This is how we figured out that modern humans first evolved in East Africa).
The UCLA study that contradicted Savolainen’s findings used a very sophisticated analysis technique to compare different parts of the genome. Using what are called SNP chips (“snip chips”) researchers are able to look at many different parts of the genome rather easily. This study used 48,000 different SNP chips, which is actually a far more in depth analysis than comparing the diversity of mtDNA lineages to determine heritage. Mitochondrial DNA is inherited only through the mother, and although it is quite resistant to mutation, using it for analysis does have its limitation. Wayne’s original studies on the red wolf used only mtDNA sequences, which is one reason why the microsatellite data could still suggest that red wolves were an ancient North American species.
Well, on May 12, UCLA released the findings of a similar genome-wide study on wolves from Eurasia and North America, red wolves, coyotes and domestic dogs. It used roughly 48,000 SNP chips to examine 48,000 loci in the genomes of these creatures.
This is where red wolves fit:
Red wolves are genetically coyotes. Like many populations of coyote, these coyotes do have some wolf ancestry. In fact, many coyotes have both wolf and dog ancestry, with only the Western population remaining “pure.”
This study also found that coyotes likely lived in the Eastern parts of North America at varying times. There are wolves with definite coyote mtDNA that predate Columbus that have been found in places like New York and Quebec. Indeed, the researchers final conclusion is that there was a massive “hybrid zone” between wolves and coyotes in North America– the largest hybrid zone ever documented in a terrestrial vertebrate species. For millennia, wolves and coyotes have exchanged genes– as have dogs and wolves and dogs and coyotes.
The Great Lakes wolves, which were said to be the same species as the red wolf, were found to have quite a bit of coyote ancestry, but it was nowhere near as much as the red wolf. The Algonquin wolf was about 40 percent coyote, which was the highest concentration coyote ancestry in the Great Lakes wolf population, while the red wolf was 75-80 percent coyote and only 25-20 percent wolf. That is just a bit higher wolf ancestry than many coyote populations. One might actually call the Algonquin wolf a “stable hybrid,” but it may have coyote ancestry that traces back before Columbus. Which means it is a subspecies of Canis lupus with coyote ancestry with a unique ecological niche– which means that one could argue for its continued preservation.
Not so with with the red wolf.
This study strongly suggests that the red wolf is not a distinct species at all. In fact, it’s probably not even a member of a species that is endangered anywhere.
That finding is not going to go over very well at all. I have noticed that this study has not been widely publicized in the media.
I think it is possible that there was a southeastern wolf population that was closely related to the Great Lakes wolf subspecies. This animal became extinct and was absorbed into the growing coyote population. Perhaps this southeastern wolf already had some coyote ancestry from many generations before, but as it disappeared, it was forced to mate with coyotes to survive. It exists now only as that 20-25% heritage that is in so-called “red wolf.”
It is very likely that the red wolf as it exists now simply came from a population admixed coyotes with wolf ancestry in Texas and Louisiana. Some of these mixed coyotes retained some wolf features. These coyotes with wolf features were the ones that were trapped, deemed an endangered species, and then were released into Eastern North Carolina, where the US Fish and Wildlife service has tried to keep this breed pure under the assumption that it is a species of rare wolf from an ancient North American lineage.
As for the pack hunting aspect of this “red wolf,” coyotes can learn to form packs and evolve larger size, even if they have only traces of wolf ancestry. That is certainly the case with the Eastern coyote, which is now evolving into a kind of wolf-coyote that hunts deer. And that would explain why red wolves would form packs and hunt deer and raccoons in North Carolina. Pack-hunting is not exclusively the purview of wolves. Coyotes can do it, too.
This study is the most advanced analysis of the red wolf’s genetics that has yet been performed. These results have not trickled down into the popular conscience yet.
But once they do, it is going to be very hard to argue for the continued preservation of the red wolf in Eastern North Carolina or anywhere else it has been released. A big coyote with wolf ancestry that hunts deer is not an endangered species at all. We have them in West Virginia, but no one would call them an endangered species or some ancient wolf lineage. People want bounties on that coyote here.
But the US Fish and Wildlife Service and many, many scientists have put countless hours into red wolf. Lots of money has been spent.
How are these new facts going to be received?
It is no longer the red wolf. It is the creature formerly known as the red wolf.
That finding is an affront to the conscience of so many people.
And I don’t know how we can justify preserving this form of deer-hunting coyote when we already have another much more healthy population of deer-hunting coyote that continues to establish itself in the East.
These questions have yet to be answered.
But the debate surely will start soon. The US federal government is looking for programs to cut, and funding for red wolf reintroduction and management looks like its been dealt a pretty crushing blow.
I don’t see any how any other genetic studies can cast doubt onto what UCLA’s researchers have found.
Oh well.
There are plenty of other more worthy endangered species– including the Mexican wolf subspecies and the Island fox– that need some attention. Perhaps these animals could benefit from some of the funding and man-hours that have been allocated to red wolves.
That is one positive for which we can all hope.
The truth is not going to be received, but at least it’s the truth.
***
H/T to Dave at Little Heelers for passing this onto me. He had me look at it for what it said about the genetics of Italian and Spanish wolves (for some reason). But the findings on the red wolf were a much bigger deal!
***
Update: To be fair, Nowak did eventually drop the Canis edwardii theory in 2002 and adopted the mosbachensis theory, which is very similar to what I thought these wolves were.
However, we were both wrong in assuming that modern red wolves were either derivatives of edwardii or mosbachensis. The only mosbachensis in the red wolf is the 20-25 percent of “gray wolf” in its ancestry. Some authorities count the mosbachensis wolf as Canis lupus mosbachensis, an extinct early subspecies of the “gray wolf.”
Edwardii was likely an early wolf-like coyote or wolf-like Canis related to the coyote.
Related Post:
Natural History 
“For some reason,” paleontology bias.
There are plenty of political reasons, too.
Red wolves were largely a success story. They bred well in the wild and didn’t bother anyone. It’s in relatively remote part of North Carolina.
Even though it’s remote, it’s quite accessible to the major populations centers on the East Coast. North Carolina itself is one of the largest states in terms of population, something like number 11 or 12 out of 50.
So here you’d have a visible and highly successful endangered species program.
The problem is that it was based on some really dubious science– that now I think has been debunked.
Ah, sorry. The reason why I ignored the “red wolf” scenario is because I already knew they’re modern hybrids of wolves and coyotes, so I glossed over it. “Nothing new, let move on.”
When someone mentioned the Ice Age isolating the Iberian wolves from the Italian wolves, that grabbed my attention. So I was thinking like a paleontologist, not a conservationist.
It’s a good thing you decided to blog about the study since even though I knew you have a fascination with the red wolf population, I didn’t realize how deep it ran down.
Red wolf, my ass. That’s a Wooly Chupacabra.
According to several studies, deer are proliferating all over the US and Canada and have become a nuisance in the east due lack of a natural predator. A natural deer hunting predator, of what ever lineage and DNA, should be more than welcome.
It is for everyone but deer hunters.
We have a lot of white-tailed deer that are devouring both their habitat and any other vegetation.
There is really good book that covers what deer are doing in the Eastern US and what wolves and cougars could be doing to solve these problems:
http://www.amazon.com/Where-Wild-Things-Were-Ecological/dp/1596912995
It seems like a great book, exactly catering to my taste. I will surely be checking it out. Thanks for sharing.
Hi,
I just completed reading this book. It is an awesome book. The parts written about islands developing due to constructing a dam over a river in Peru reminded me of another good book – ‘Time is short and water rises’ by John Walsh. The guy saved about 10,000 animals from death by transporting them out of lake area. That too was an awesome book.
This is really fascinating. I especially liked the genome mapping figure. What does IRNP stand for in the Great Lakes wolves section?
Isle Royale National Park. It’s an island in Lake Superior that has the most studied wolf population in the world. They prey on moose, and much of the predator-prey relationship models come from the studies of those wolves. They are also quite inbred, and this inbreeding has resulted in an extreme proliferation of spinal deformities in the population.
Because its an island, it’s very hard for wolves from the UP, Wisconsin, or Canada to get there and add new blood. The wolves colonized the island by crossing the ice, and although one wolf did come across in the late 90’s, no new blood has been added.
I was surprised they didn’t include the wolf populations from the UP and LP in their study, but figured it was because they’re mostly from Wisconsin and Ontario anyways.
Yeah. And what about those from southern Quebec? They also are thought to have coyote ancestry.
Those are the ones that pop up in Vermont, New Hampshire, or Maine every once in a while. One was killed in Western Massachusetts a few years ago, and its origins were definitely in Quebec.
As far as I was aware, Red wolves _were_ a separate species/subspecies related to grey wolves, supported by skull morphology and some DNA studies. But, skulls post 1930 resembled coyote skulls due to hybridisation, a fact confirmed by mtDNA studies. So, all red wolves left are hybrids, and subsequently are a total waste of money, regardless of the success of their reintroduction.
Hence the Arkansas wolf from 1929 looking nothing like a coyote: it was a true red wolf.
Thanks for this well received update!
Interesting article and thanks for the canids’ relatedness chart. I’m cribbing that for my own usage. I was rather surprised at the results but I agree with the results.I never did think Red Wolves were a distinct species (and in a parallel example, I never thought Quaggas were a distinct species from common zebras, only a slightly unstriped variation)
I made an observation on the chart which possibly goes to another discussion: the Eurasian wolves at the end have the Chinese category which borders on the domesticated dogs. The Japanese wolves are not indicated but would they then actually veer into the “Dog” category by interbreeding, much like the red wolves on the coyote end of the spectrum? That might explain a few things also. I would expect the Chinese wolves were then already part-dog from their position on the chart.
I certainly claim to be no expert and canids are not my top interest, so correct me if I am wrong, but isn’t “Canis mosbachensis” another “Head breed” category defined by skull shape? My encounters with that taxonomic category were couched in such terms. That is also the way I have approached the problem in the past although nowadays I always default to the DNA studies.
Best Wishes, Dale D.
I had that exact same question about the diagram that shows dogs being closer to Chinese wolves. I have not received any official answer, but when I looked at it again, the purple blotches within the yellow seem to indicate shared SNP’s with dogs. If that is true, then wolves from Oman, Israel, and Saudi Arabia– Israel has pallipes and arabs wolves and Oman and Saudi Arabia have only arabs wolves– share more SNP’s with dogs. I t may be that the original diagram was drawn under the assumption that dogs and Chinese wolves would have similar SNP’s, and they just put there. Southwest Asia is Iran, India, and Turkey, and they have purple a lot of purple botches, too. Those are all pallipes wolves. I don’t know if the Indian wolves were those with the unique mtDNA lineage, but it would be interesting to find out.
There is a scatter plot on the supplemental materials (Figure S4) that shows dogs being closer to middle eastern wolves, so maybe that initial diagram is a bit confusing. I can send you the supplemental materials so you can examine the methodology more clearly.
The truth is that the Middle East was an important area for dog domestication, but the oldest dog remains that no one argues about their identity as dogs are dated to 15,000 years ago in European Russia (near the Ukrainian border), and one in Switzerland that dates to 14,000 years old. The oldest Middle Eastern dogs are in the 12,000 year old range in the Natufian culture. There is also a possible dog from the Aurignacian that dates to 31,000 years ago,. It was found in a Goyet Cave in Belgium, but it was not associated with humans. Its muzzle and skull shape were dog-like though– although it’s just as possible that it was just a freak wolf. There are also Chauvet Cave “dog prints” that date 26,000 years ago. They are shaped much more like a dog’s prints than a wolf’s tracks, so they are assumed to be ancient dogs.
The original genome -wide study on dogs and wolves seemed to indicate that the Middle Eastern wolves and secondarily European wolves were the primary source for most dog diversity. But there are also appears to be either another area of domestication in East Asia or there was some crossing with Chinese wolves when dogs arrived there from the Middle East. These studies need to include some more Asian dogs, of course, and this particular study used only 12 dogs from 12 Western Kennel Club breeds that have origins in the West. I also think that samples from Pre-Columbian dogs need to be included. My guess is that East Asia was an important area for domestication, and in the genome-wide study, dingoes, chow-chows, and the Japanese spitz breeds had some affinity with East Asian dogs. Alaskan Malamutes had some North American wolf affinity, too– but was had a lot of affinity with East Asian dogs. (The North American wolf ancestry in that breed could be more recent. It was and is very common to breed these dogs with wolves.)
I don’t think anyone has any good mosbachensis samples or any really ancient Canis DNA of any sort. And thus, we’re left with paleontology, which does use morphological methodologies– simply because we don’t have good DNA samples.
However, I’d like to see if we could find dire wolf DNA (mtDNA would be nice but perhaps nuclear) and see where that animal fit into all of this. We may even have be able to get some Armbruster’s wolf, too, and see if Armbruster’s wolf is the ancestor of the Dire wolf, as is postulated in the paleontological literature.
I’d also like to see one of these genome-wide studies examine the Honshu wolf, the Indian wolves and Tibetan wolves with the unique mtDNA sequences, and the newly discovered African wolf, and see where they fit within this whole Canis lupus species complex, which appears to be almost as diverse morphologically as the domestic population of Canis lupus (domestic dogs) is today. Not only do we have little wolves, like the smaller specimens of arabs wolves (which share the same small gene that small domestic dogs have), the African wolf, and the extinct honshu wolf, there was a subspecies of Canis lupus that lived in Alaska during the Pleistocene that was quite large and had very powerful jaws. It was suggested that it hunted mammoths, though it could have just as as easily been a scavenger. It was a wolf that had become an arctic spotted hyena. http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/19355843/ns/technology_and_science-science/t/bone-crushing-wolves-devoured-mammoths/
So we have a really interesting species to examine!
[…] Through his research and interviews with those who had first hand accounts with these animals, he found that the settlers believed that there were three kinds of wolf in Pennsylvania. There was a large gray wolf and a large black wolf, but these appeared to breed true, even though it wasn’t unusual for a black wolf to whelp a gray pup. And there was a small brown wolf, which sounds suspiciously like an account of the existence of an eastern population of coyotes. I think the corpus of the evidence– particularly the genetic evidence–suggests that coyotes did exist in the East, but they were extirpated with the wolves. As the larger wolves were removed from other parts of their range, the smaller coyotes were able to file back into the East again. (The so-called red wolf is largely a fictional animal.) […]
Interesting post!
YNP wolves are actually Canadian wolves. How did they account for that in the study? Also, eastern coyote are larger than western– is the premise that they are relic wolf coyote hybrids? Finally packing is not unique to eastern coyote, my boss did his graduate work on Utah yotes that packed up in winter to hunt deer.
The wolves in Yellowstone are from Western Canada. The Western North American wolves and those of the North are closely related. Northern and Western wolves derive from big game hunting wolves that colonized America later on. These are the ones that are big enough to regularly hunt moose, bison, and muskoxen.
The premise is that Eastern coyotes have quite a bit of wolf in them. That makes them larger, but the other thing that makes them larger is that they have begun to specialize in hunting deer, which leads to selection pressures for larger size. The wolves introduce the genes for larger size, but hunting deer leads to the selection process to keep those genes in the population.
Coyotes in any place can pack up and hunt deer, but the problem is that Western coyotes don’t do it for generation after generation. Western coyotes also don’t have wolf in them, which keeps the genes for larger size and stronger jaws out of the population. Which makes deer hunting more more difficult. Coyotes are much more aggressive with their pack mates than wolves are, which leads to more dispersals from the packs. Wolves are much ore aggressive with wolves from other packs, which they will often kill and eat, but within their own packs, there is very little fighting, except during mating season. Much of this notion of wolves constantly fighting comes from watching unrelated wolves in captive packs, but coyotes are often too aggressive with each other to maintain cohesive packs. Coyotes behave more like Jack Russells.
One of the reasons why Western coyotes don’t have wolf in them is that Western wolves are large and derive from later colonizers of North America from Eurasia. A 100 to 120 pound wolf is not going to want to mate with a 25-40 pound coyote, even though you might get dogs with that sort of size variance to mate with each other. Wolves and coyotes cross only when the populations are stressed.. They also have very different body language.
The observation that Eastern Coyotes form packs is correct, at least from my personal experience. Ontario farmers regularly report Coyotes attacking their sheep in packs. I know this Ontario farmer who keeps Kuvasz for protecting her sheep from Coyotes. She says that Coyotes regularly call out her dogs as a pack strategy. Couple of coyotes would distract her dogs who chase them out of her farm, but the other coyotes would just be waiting and attack from the rear and try to get away with a lamb or a chicken.
However, there is no way that Coyotes of Toronto and Mississauga would form packs anytime soon. They are more like, well lone wolves, and will get away with pet cats and small dogs if the owners are careless.
[…] One must keep in mind that Shoemaker’s taxonomy of Pennsylvania wolves is a bit screwy. I do think there is some merit to the possibility that the coyote did live in the Eastern US, and this “small brown wolf” was the original Eastern coyote. However, the black and gray wolves appear to have been the same species, though likely of different subspecies. It is of note that he mentioned that large gray wolves were living in West Virginia, which contradicts the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s assertion that only “red wolves” lived here. The modern red wolf is a recent hybrid between several wolf subspecies and the coyote. […]
[…] Domestic dogs, dingoes, and New Guinea singing dogs are also part of this species. The s0-called red wolf is a recent hybrid between the coyote and the wolf, and the proposed Eastern wolf species is a wolf with some coyote ancestry. Although some Indian […]
[…] The creature formerly known as the red wolf […]
[…] As regular readers know from reading this blog, I am very skeptical of splitting species. I have yet to be presented with convincing evidence that there is more than one species of Holarctic wolf. I do believe the Ethiopian wolf does represent a distinct species, as do the coyote and golden jackal, but all the other things called wolves– save the maned wolf of South America and its cousin, the extinct Falkland Islands wolf– are part of a very diverse species that includes domestic dogs, dingoes, and New Guinea singing dogs. At one time, I thought the red wolf was part of these species, now it should be considered part of the coyote species. It is nothing more than a glorified Eastern coyote. […]
[…] offspring, so there were populations of wolves that were derived from wolf and coyote hybrids, like the so-called red wolf and the proposed Eastern wolf species.Virtually all coyotes in the East have some wolf […]
[…] mind that much of the scientific establishment still regards the red wolf as a valid species, even though the most sophisticated genetic analyses seem to point to it being coyote with some wolf anc… It has only recently been confirmed that the kouprey is a distinct species and not a hybrid with […]
[…] is that many of them derive from a female coyote ancestor. That’s why they have coyote mtDNA. Their nuclear DNA shows that they are wolves with quite a bit of coyote in them. The red wolf, by contrast, is a coyote with some wolf in […]
[…] The creature formerly known as the red wolf […]
[…] Recent genomic analyses have found that this so-called ancient species is nothing more than a large coyote with some relatively recent wolf ancestry. […]
[…] I have not seen any comparative studies of dire wolf dna of any sort with those of modern members of the genus Canis. Most studies on dire wolf taxonomy glean their analysis from comparative morphology– which is quite a dubious undertaking when we’re dealing with the dog family (see the red wolf debacle!) […]
[…] and wolves from many different populations found that the s0-called red wolf (supposed Canis rufus) is actually almost entirely coyote in its make-up. It does have some wolf ancestry, but this wolf ancestry comes from the Holarctic wolf (Canis […]
[…] to 300,000 years ago. Canis edwardii has sometimes been posited as an ancestor the red wolf, which we now know to be nothing more than a recent hybrid between the modern wolf and the modern coyote. Others, including Ron Nowak, have contended that the coyote, red wolf, and Holarctic wolf derived […]
[…] that red wolves wered claimed to have derived from the ancient Canis edwardii species, but it is now regarded as a recent hybrid between modern wolves and coyotes. And at one time, it was once accepted that the bush dog of South America was actually a species of […]
Paper is now free to access. No charge.
[…] The creature formerly known as “the red wolf” […]
Hybridization of two closely related species is one mechanism that can cause speciation. If red wolves are the result of coyote and gray wolf breeding, that doesn’t mean they are not a separate species.
I’ve analyzed the number of Pleistocene canid fossils found in the Florida database. During the Pleistocene Florida hosted dire wolves and coyotes. Dire wolves outnumbered coyotes about 2-1. There is only 1 red wolf fossil dating to the Pleistocene in the database.
Following the extinction of the dire wolf, some gray wolves colonized the region and crossbred with the coyotes there, thus creating a unique species.
The DNA shows that red wolves are recent hybrids between wolves and coyotes.
DNA trumps fossils in this case.
This is the most comprehensive genomic analysis ever performed on wild animals.
So-called red wolves are actually almost entirely coyote.
Therefore, they should be classified as part of Canis latrans, and not contrived to be some sort of species. The red wolf did not exist until wolves were extirpated from the East. DNA doesn’t lie.
Now, there is a way to falsify hybrid origin. See my post on the Kouprey.
A primitive sort of wolf would look like a “red wolf.” The primitive wolves of the Middle East and South Asia do look like red wolves.
I am not enamored with fossil evidence. I need DNA.
Your inability to understand what this study actually says, and then parrot what it falsifies says more about you than anything else.
The Fish and Wildlife Service is actually engaging in something quite dishonest here, and David Mech’s attack on this study is laughable.
Here’s the full study: http://genome.cshlp.org/content/21/8/1294.full.pdf+html
If you want to see something really interesting, check out the Kouprey of Cambodia.
There was an mtDNA study performed on them, and found that they had banteng mtDNA.
There was a study that came out that said the kouprey was a hybrid between a zebu, the Indicus domestic cattle, and the banteng.
They did some nuclear DNA studies, and found that this was entirely false. It turns out that a female kouprey wound up contributing her mtDNA to Cambodian banteng, and strangely, her mtDNA sequence wound up being the main mtDNA sequence for Cambodian banteng alive today.
Thus, kouprey are a unique species, even though they are extinct in the wild.
If red wolves were the same way, the SNP study that I mentioned would have turned up something like this. It did not.
I never thought red wolves were unique. There are plenty of wolves with coyote mtDNA, particularly in Eastern Canada and the Midwest.
However, I initially thought that the red wolf was a primitive line of Canis lupus that did hybridize with coyotes when Canis lupus first started to colonize this continent– which is not entirely different from what you’re saying.
I wrong.
Now, coyotes that lived in North America during the Pleistocene and even earlier were actually large and even wolf-like.
I don’t know why it’s not at least considered that these fossilized red wolves are nothing more than wolf-like coyotes.
Without wolves around in the East, many Eastern coyotes are developing a wolf-like phenotype. Part of this comes from hybridization, but there is also a lot of selection pressure for coyotes to become better predators of deer. Thus, they are becoming more like wolves.
Why do red wolves look like wolves?
I think it’s pretty much the same thing.
There’s also some historical records, that have largely been ignored, that coyotes did live in the Eastern US. Henry Wharton Shoemaker mentions them in his Wolf Days in Pennsylvania. What likely happened was that the endemic Eastern coyote became extinct along with our indigenous wolf subspecies, then western coyotes came in as the East became more urbanized and hunting pressures began to ease up. These Western coyotes then interbred with the remaining wolves, creating the so-called Eastern wolves and red wolf.
If you read the SNP study, the only wolves that have coyote in them that date before colonization are those of the Western Great Lakes, coyote got mixed in no more than 900 years ago.
This is why I don’t buy the red wolf at all.
[…] The creature formerly known as the red wolf […]
[…] The creature formerly known as the red wolf […]
[…] The creature formerly known as the red wolf […]
[…] The creature formerly known as “the red wolf” […]
[…] The creature formerly known as “the red wolf” […]
[…] The creature formerly known as “the red wolf” […]
[…] The creature formerly known as “the red wolf” […]
[…] The creature formerly known as the “red wolf” […]
[…] 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 […]
[…] 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 coyote and, indeed, are almost entirely of that ancestry. […]
[…] most thorough genetic studies show that red wolves are a mythological creature, created out of the overactive imaginations of scientists who should know […]
[…] population from Texas and Louisiana that became absorbed by an increasing coyote population through very recent interbreeding. The animal is now almost entirely of coyote […]
[…] animals into unique species really isn’t that different from what people have tried to do with the red wolf and the so-called Eastern wolf species. Both have ancestry from both wolves and coyotes, but that […]
[…] The creature formerly known as “the red wolf” […]
[…] is exactly the same procedure that the red wolf conservationists are using. Of course, the red wolf’s exact taxonomic status is very dodgy, but the so-called “pure” red wolves readily mate with Eastern coyotes that wander into […]
[…] These findings almost beg for a study that examines a large sample of nuclear DNA, if not something like the genome-wide comparisons that were performed on wolves and coyotes. […]
in your photo of the coyotes wolf and dog, i would have put the wolf on the left, the coyote in the middle and the dog on the right. if i may… a wolf will breed in the wild with a coyote and not a dog, they eat dogs (im talking about real wolves and the naturalists who studied them all agreed back in the day when a wolf had not been tampered with) (as it is i fiind it hard to say that a wolf is a true wolf any more with all this outside breeding with dogs) but if i may continue… the coyote would bred with both wolf and dog, being the middle man if you would…. What i have seen to be so for me, is that the coyote is a decended of the jackel and hyenna lines and the wolf of the dire and bear type carnivores with the larger heads. The difference is not so much in the skulls, but in the behavior of the two very distinctive lines… while the wolf howls and has a deeper voice, the coyotte and hyenna both yip… and have a similar approach in body movements as well as their closeness in food source/nutrition habits. On the subject of the coloration of the coat: The Red gene is a very very very……. dominate gene. Once a strain or line of animals this gene carries on forever….. very hard to get this out of the lines. It also carries the yellow gene almost as an overlapping partner. Once i seperate the red genes from my stock, i only have a bit more to go to get the yellow and cream yellow deminished. These things i speak of may hold some key to further analysis of the seperation and the coming together of the coyote and the wolf in our Americas.. like yourself, i never thought that the red wolf should have been catagorized as a wolf, Nor… the dog and wolf in the same breath… I think scientists did us all an unjust when they changed that classification. Too many large differences, regardless of hcdna
when one only figures in skull demensions as a way to seperate species i think that is a % rate that will mess them up quite often. Lois
mcdna” sorry
[…] is likely that monogamy in coyotes is one factor keeping this species distinct. Although there is plenty of evidence that many populations of coyote are mixed with dogs, they all still remain primarily coyote in ancestry. The distinctness of the coyote species may be […]
[…] […]
[…] The creature formerly known as the “red wolf […]
could you please point me in the right direction – I am searching for the DNA results from the Louisiana Catahoula Leopard dog and the Red Wolf. I keep hearing of the testing that was done and can’t find the results other than “reports” no red wolf DNA was found. Could you please help me – my email address is: ampoikbit@gmail.com
I’ve not heard anything, but I do know the merle coloration is not from any wild canid. I’ve heard it claimed that “red wolves” were sometimes merle, but it’s unlikely that that this is the source. I wouldn’t be surprised if there were some wolves in Catahoulas though. Plott hounds and lacy dogs are said to have some wolf ancestry, and there is always there was a pack of griffon hounds in Brittany that were often crossed with wolves (to make them better wolf hunters!)
Today, the Russians still cross their laikas with wolves to make them better hunters:
During the early 1990s we used to hunt deer and small game in the forest just north of the Louisiana coastal prairie. Both coyotes and red wolves were present. At night I’d here the yips of coyotes and the long, drawn-out howls of wolves. These vocalizations were very different. We trapped several entirely typical coyotes and, three times, I saw red wolves running in the woods. One wolf was hot on the heels of a doe.
The wolves were a little larger than coyotes and two seemed especially long in the leg. The most distinctive feature was their heads. Coyotes have somewhat foxlike heads but these red wolves were heavier-muzzled, more like German Shepherds. The coloration wasn’t much different but, generally speaking, the wolves were distinctly red or grizzled with black.
I know a fellow who had what he claimed to be a southern ‘red wolf’ mounted. He says he’d been losing calves and determined the animal was denned up under his barn. He stated, on further examination, that calf and deer bones were under the barn. The ‘wolf’ was a pale beige–almost white–the size of a largish coyote. Whatever it was, it was clearly a dog–something-or-other hybrid.
I personally believe that red wolves are a hybrid swarm—wolf-coyote crosses. The question is whether or not they are a STABLE hybrid swarm? Does the animal we know of as the ‘red wolf’ readily interbreed with coyotes? My personal experience suggests that, at least for some short period of time, red wolves and coyotes weren’t interbreeding quickly i.e. that the sharing of range didn’t immediately result in disappearance of animals with red wolf traits.
If the red wolf hybrid swarm were indeed stable, it might warrant protection. On the other hand, Fed. Fish and Wildlife’s behavior belies the obvious. They don’t think the red wolf populations are stable by any stretch of the imagination. They are spending lots and lots of money to keep coyotes away from their ‘red wolves’. They clearly believe that their ‘pure’ red wolves will be interbred out of existence when a few coyotes show up. This being the case, it makes more sense to preserve these interesting hybrids in zoos and other menageries.
[…] is a huge debate about what a red wolf is. The best genetic study I’ve seen on them suggests they are recent hybrids between a relict population of Southeastern… Canis lupus wolves) and coyotes. What made the red wolf was not God Almighty but the extinction of […]