Forrest Galante hanging out with a socialized wolf that has features similar to the Southern Rocky Mountains gray wolf.
As long-time readers of this blog know, I am a huge fan of Forrest Galante’s Extinct or Alive on Animal Planet. In the new season, he documents the discovery of the Fernandina tortoise, a Galapagos giant tortoise that has been declared extinct in the wild. He also has found an unusual giant lion in Zimbabwe that has genetics that cannot be described to any known form of lion in Zimbabwe and might be descended from the massive Cape lion of South Africa.
So yeah, I love this show. The most recent episode involved looking for the Southern Rockies gray wolf in the Sierras of California. Some canid had been killing cattle in that part of the world, and when Galante’s team went into the region looking for the animal, they found lots of interesting things. With use of a German shepherd tracking dog, he discovers a massive deer that has been killed by a canid, and later investigations revealed a large canid that left massive tracks in the snow.
He finally captured the animal on trail camera, and he initially thought it was a wolf. But it had too many coyote-like features to suggest that it was pure. So Galante surmised that this animal was a coywolf.
Now, this raises a lot of questions. One is that no one has ever seen a coyote-wolf cross in the West before. We know that they exist or existed because the genomes of Western wolves suggest some tiny amounts of coyote ancestry. But no one has seen one before in the West.
Further, the first wolf to enter California from Oregon was noted for his friendly relationship with coyotes. This wolf was of the Northwestern wolf subspecies, but it is possible that he passed some genes into the coyote population. In recent years, wolves have colonized and bred in California. One pack, called the Shasta Pack, mysteriously disappeared, either killed by poachers or just dispersed. It is possible that a survivor of this pack wandered south into the Sierras and bred with a coyote.
So Galante is finding lots of interesting things in the wild. One thing I did sort of quibble with in the episode is idea that wolves and humans were at constant enmity in indigenous cultures. Yes, there was conflict between hunting man wolves on this continent, but the work of Raymond Pierotti and Brandy Fogg has revealed that many indigenous cultures had a close relationship with wolves, which often bordered on something like a pre-domestication symbiosis. He played up potential conflicts between indigenous people and wolves, but reality was a lot more nuanced than that.
Also, I don’t think most people are aware of the really upsetting discovery that gray wolves and coyotes last shared a common ancestor only around 50,000 years ago and that the two forms of canid have exchanged genes across the continent. That discovery has been sort of paradigm shattering for me. I have never looked at coyotes the same way since it came out.
Wolves and lions were once the most widespread large predators in the world. Depending upon which version of lion taxonomy one prefers, the American lion was either a subspecies of modern lion or a lineage of cave lions, which were a sister species to the modern lion. If one considers it the former, then lions had a much larger range than gray wolves ever did, but if one considers it the latter, then gray wolves were the most widely distributed large predator.
It should be no surprise that lions and wolves have lots of mysteries lurking in their double helices. Galante is getting the public to look at these animals with new eyes. Lots of hidden things are there to be discovered.
More work need to be done to document Galante’s coywolf, but it is something that should be taken seriously.
