Natural History

The term “African wolf” often has been used to refer to the Ethiopian wolf of the Ethiopian Highlands and Xenocyon lycaonoides, the extinct ancestor the African wild dog or “Painted wolf.”

But now, it looks that name is going to refer to some animals that were previously classified as golden jackals. Now, the exact taxonomic status of the wolf-like “jackals” of Egypt has long been contentious.  When I was first reading about wolves as a child, the maps of wolf subspecies always included a subspecies that was native to Egypt and Libya. This animal was always called Canis lupus lupaster. However, around the year 2000, I noted that these wolves had been reclassified as golden jackals and were referred to as Canis aureus lupaster.

I always had some issues with this classification.  These North African golden jackals were larger than the golden jackals of Europe, which would have been the second largest subspecies if the Egyptian jackal would have been considered a golden jackal. This classification meant that golden jackals break Bergmann’s rule, something that other wolf-like canids follow rather closely. Bergmann’s rule says that warm-blooded animals tend to be larger in colder environments than those found in warmer ones. Wolves follow this rule fairly closely, although the wolves of the forested regions of Alaska tend to be larger than the arctic subspecies. The Balkans are a much colder place than Egypt, and one would have expected the European golden jackal to be the largest subspecies.

My other problem with this classification was that these Egyptian and Libyan canids looked very similar to the Arabian wolves, which had long been recognized as the subspecies that lives in the Sinai. If an Arabian wolf could live in the Sinai, why couldn’t it live in the rest of Egypt or North Africa?

The original Mitochondrial DNA studies on these canids found that they were more similar to the golden jackals of Israel than Arabian wolves, which are part of the Holarctic wolf species. It was decided to move these animals into the golden jackal species and that has been where they have been classified for several years now.

I came up with the possibility that the wolf-like appearance of these jackals came from fact that there were once Arabian wolves in Egypt and Libya, and these wolves became heavily persecuted. Just as the wolves of Eastern and Southern US bred with female coyotes when their populations dropped, I surmised that these wolves did the same with golden jackals. And that is why these wolves have golden jackal MtDNA.

However, I was wrong.

A study was released today that found that the lupaster jackals are actually wolves. This study, released in the journal PLoS One, used a boostrapping methodology to compare the MtDNA sequences of golden jackals, Holarctic wolves (most modern wolves are of this ancestry), the Indian wolf, and the Himalayan wolf. The last two are considered older lineages than the main Holarctic wolf lineage, leading some taxonomists to conclude that they are unique species (not by this armchair taxonomist, however). The study found that the lupaster jackals were within the wolf species– but, like the Himalayan and Indian wolves, represent an older lineage.

The study also found that supposed golden jackals in the Ethiopia were actually the same species as the lupaster jackals.

That means that Canis lupus has an African range that exends from Egypt and Libya to Ethiopia.

Contrary to what some media reports suggest, the findings of these study did not discover a new African species of wolf– unless one thinks that the Himalayan wolf and Indian wolf are separate species. All the researchers found was that there are Canis lupus wolves in Africa.

The authors suggest that we combine the lupaster population with those wolfish jackals in Ethiopia into a single subspecies of wolf– and call it Canis lupus lupaster. The authors conclude that more golden jackals in other countries need to be tested to see if they are actually wolves.  The wolf’s range in Africa may be more extensive than we originally thought.

So the diversity of Canis lupus is even greater than we thought. The wolves in the Ethiopian population of the African wolf are actually smaller in size than the Ethiopian wolves with which they share a habitat.  The animals are actually closer to the golden jackal in size, which means that this is the smallest extant subspecies of wolf. These wolves are well within the Southern clade of wolves, which are the most primitive of subspecies.

And very much in keeping with Bergmann’s rule.

This finding is very much in keeping with our understanding that the diversity in domestic Canis lupus is reflected in the wild population. The little African wolves of Ethiopia are the same species as the big wolves of Alaska, which are the same species as the chihuahua and the extinct bone-crushing wolf of the Pleistocene.

The diversity of this species never ceases to amaze me. And I am so glad that this remarkable species has been able to form such an intimate relationship with us.

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Thanks very much to Jess for sending me this study and making my day!