Some of you may remember a post I wrote last winter about cattle that were conserved as wildlife on English estates.
These cattle were white or predominantly white in color, and it was often said they represented the aboriginal British wild cattle that had roamed the forests.
Some authors said they were very similar to the aurochs from which all taurine cattle descend. Others claimed they derived from Roman cattle that were brought to Great Britain for sacrificial purposes.
A more likely source for these cattle are unimproved strains of domestic cattle that were allowed to graze in the forests during the Middle Ages. The Charter of the Forest (1217) gave commoners grazing rights (“agistment”) for their cattle. Commoners maintained their cattle in the forests for a time, but then as economic conditions began to work against the manorial system, the cattle were abandoned.
When nobles began keeping vast deer parks for their own amusement in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the landowners kept these herds of cattle as a game species. These animals were often referred to as “white urus” (white aurochs) because it was accepted wisdom that they represented the aboriginal strain of wild cattle that were native to Great Britain.
Of course, we didn’t have DNA in those days, and no one had really looked at aurochs skeletons to make comparisons with these animals.
It was just accepted fact until about 1850, and by then, they’d been preserving these herds on estates all over England for hunting purposes.
No one really cared.
To preserve the white herds, any calves that were born of another color were culled, and if cattle from another breed showed up, they were driven off.
The contours of this story almost exactly fit what we’ve seen with the red wolf.
Red wolves have been suggested to be an ancient species of wolf.
They have been called derivatives of Canis edwardii, a proposed ancestor of both wolves and coyotes the originated in the Pliocene, and then they were claimed to be derived from Canis mosbachensis, a primitive wolf that has also been suggested as an ancestor to wolves– and sometimes coyotes.
The red wolf is largely being conserved based upon that fossil data, but there has been some very limited–and very dodgy– genetic work that has examined mtDNA, y-chromosomes, and autosomal microsatellites.
This data was then falsified by a genome-wide analysis. A genome-wide analysis is a much better measure of actual ancestry than very limited samples of the genome in these earlier studies. Even if these limited samples had more individual red wolves in their studies, they are nothing more than a lot of very small samples. The genome-wide analysis looked at a small part of the genome, but the markers it looked at were better distributed across the genome. And they looked at far more of the genetic material than any of these very limited studies did.
The red wolf is no more an ancient wolf species than the white park cattle of England are the “white urus.”
But the way red wolves are maintained is very similar to them.
Coyotes are trapped out of red wolf range to keep the bloodlines “pure” in exactly the same way that the gamekeepers culled colored calves and shot interloping cattle of different breeds.
The only difference is the falsified nonsense that underpins the red wolf’s status is from a more advanced scientific perspective than the totally contrived nonsense that made the white feral cattle England into the “white urus.”
The red wolf is actually a coyote with some wolf ancestry. The wolf subspecies that lived in East Texas and Louisiana became extinct, and it likely began to become absorbed into the local coyote population. Most of the red wolf’s ancestry is coyote, but about one quarter of its ancestry is said to have come from this wolf subspecies. Coyotes with some wolf ancestry are not uncommon, especially in the Northeast and Eastern Canada.
So this strongly suggests that the red wolf is of dubious conservation value.
It is of no more conservation value than white park cattle are.
It might be better to call the red wolf “America’s park coyote.”
That’s all it is.
See related post
- The dubious red wolf
- The creature formerly known as “the red wolf”
- No unique “Eastern wolf” species
- The junk science behind the red wolf
- The Canis lupus/Canis latrans species complex
- Some more red wolf nonsense
Damn, that pic looks like Wile E. Coyote in the flesh!
People here also make value judgements between different animals and birds. I try not to do that too much but I might make an exception of the rat — no not quite my favourite in case you wondered. I hope you were not meaning to be particularly rude in calling the animal in the photograph “an American park coyote” which in any case doen’t sound a particularly derogatory term.
How does the coyote genome compare to the wolf’s? How different? yet they interbreed- perhaps not freely, but they can.
Coyotes are an older species– a lot more diversity than wolves, especially in this hemisphere.
They have a lot of mtDNA lineages too.
I hope to hear more!
There’s really not a lot to say.
We know that coyotes split from the wolf lineage 700,000 to one million years ago.
Which makes some of these potential ancestors very unlikely.
It is remarkable how lifeforms successfully interbreed not withstanding their very distant common ancestry. Take my wife and I for instance – she is Welsh which is a very primitive branch of homo sapiens – wait a minute I haven’t seen any DNA evidence from the children yet- must get onto that right away.
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I agree that he controversy covering the red wolf over many years has been amusing. With the increasing sensitivity of genetic techniques, the confusion grows less and less. For decades, I, too, suspected the Red wolf was a hybrid of wolf and coyote and with intermediate morphology; definitely not a separate species. Since I have not followed any of the studies for 8 years, I found your blog series on this topic to be a very good critical analysis.
However, despite the nearly conclusive evidence that the red ‘wolf’ is most likely a coyote color morph (agouti morphs are more common in coyote than wolf), and can interbreed more successfully with both wolf and coyote than interbreeding of the two latter (usually asymmetrical breeding occurs between the two more common species), conservation of the red wolf might be worthwhile, considering it as a unique hybrid. Most of the conservation efforts for red wolves are funded by private groups and NGOs with comparatively less federal dollars dedicated to other species.
With many species heading for extinction at an alarming rate, a ‘one drop rule’ may accelerate extinction for many species that, for one reason or another, have less resiliency in adaptation to increasing anthropogenic and climatic pressures on habitat. They don’t have the luxuries of continued survival that we do. Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water yet.
I’m fine if private individuals want to save an esoteric form of coyote.
I just want them to stop lying about them.
This animal is not Canis edwardii or Canis mosbachensis.
It’s no more those things than it is Canis dirus or Xenocyon lycanoides.
I want species to be saved. Biodiversity is a major issue that I do discuss on this blog a lot.
I just want us to focus on that which is real and truly of conservation value instead of what is a bit more dubious.
Some are a bit slow in adopting changes in taxonomy. Regardless, most of the research centers I know use ‘Canis lupus rufus’ for the red wolf. Two reasons for conservation efforts of the Red wolf are the color morph genetics (possible model for canine epigenetics) and their adaptability for ‘species hopping.’ (their ability and success to breed with both wolf and coyote in the wild versus less successful wolf/coyote crossings). As one biologist commented (while grinning facetiously), “The [red wolves] confuse the heck out of both wolf and coyote, but the latter are more receptive to the red wolf than they are each other. Maybe there’s really something about red hair.”
LOL
Well, there are behavioral species barriers between coyotes and wolves.
And I think this actually is pretty good evidence that the red wolf is very much a type of coyote.
I’d like to know why the name isn’t Canis latrans rufus, because the bulk of its DNA is Canis latran?
I think another reason why they are so keen to mate with coyotes is that red wolves are starting to have some issues with an inbreeding depression. It’s not as severe as it exists in dog breeds, but it’s starting to become more of a problem.
Wild canids have pretty strong inbreeding avoidance behavior, so it might be that the red wolves are trying to find mates that are genetically a bit different from their proposed mates.
The San Nicolas island fox is a very inbred wild canid. It might be the least genetically diverse of all mammals, yet it has very diverse and heterozygous MHC haplotypes (immune system genes). That’s because the foxes have bred with other foxes that have had different MHC haplotypes, even though they are essentially all related.
Maybe that’s what red wolves are doing and why they have to constantly trap coyotes out of red wolf range.
The red wolves are trying to increase their genetic diversity, while we’re trying to keep them pure.
It’s really not that different to what’s going on with so many dog breeds.
I really had to LOL at that last sentence. The rule still is, “you can’t boss Mother Nature very much or very far, or you will turn into a sorcerer’s apprentice.”, much as the AKC has.
People tend to have good intentions when they exert their selection criteria on animals (aka ‘domestication’). However, that criteria tends to spin into other arenas, such as purely cosmetic to the detriment of resulting ‘breed’ standards. Sheep and horses are other examples to add to the list. Selected for superficial traits and usually other detrimental traits develop, such as navicular disease in large horses with small dainty hooves, big muscled sheep that can no longer birth unassisted.
My favorite domestication experiment and demonstration is the Russian silver fox, actually a color morph of the red fox. It only took seven generations for geneticist Dmitri Belyaev and colleagues to selectively breed a beautiful gentle fox that is adapted to living with humans in their households and that demonstrate changes in physiology and morphology (allegedly following the hypothesized canine domestication process).
Yet, it is still a ‘red’ fox.
“still a red fox” so unfortunately still a smelly fox – from a potential domestication point of view. No way out of that I presume?
Apparently, there may be more than just behavioral barriers; possibly relative biological incompatibility. When they do occur, the offspring as not as hardy and suffer a higher than expected mortality rate, although I haven’t seen any data on litter sizes.
Regardless, I don’t think we have seen the end of the ‘Red Wolf’ controversy. And taxonomical changes happen more frequent than not.