Yep. This study actually happened.
The genome-wide study just confirmed it.
But the red wolf supporters, who I am now calling “red wolfaboos,” will not listen, and will dig around in the scientific toilet to find some much older and much more limited to support their position.
Not all scientific studies are created equal.
Things that are true or false are one or the other. One’s opinion means nothing.
I’m actually getting tired of writing things about the red wolf, but the inability of people to understand that the VonHoldt study is much better and much more comprehensive than all the others is making me somewhat infuriated.
These red wolfaboos are acting a lot like creationists.
They really are.
I’m not impressed. And I’m not amused.
I read this comic right before seeing this article. It seemed fitting.
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=2627&utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+smbc-comics%2FPvLb+%28Saturday+Morning+Breakfast+Cereal+%28updated+daily%29%29
LOL That’s about right!
Oddly enough, the “red wolf” was originally called the Black Wolf, “Canis niger”. Some “subspecies” were known for having numerous black or very dark individuals. I wonder if those animals, too, were ever preserved and/or included in any DNA studies? There is a photo of a black-phase “Red Wolf” in Maxwell Riddle’s book “The Wild Dogs in Life and Legend”. It’s been determined that black wolves in North America are the result of long-ago crosses with domestic dogs. I’m going to presume that the same is true for the “black-phase Red Wolf”, but I have not seen any studies confirming it, and indeed, many people are unaware that the black-phase animals even existed.
I debunked this in an earlier post:
https://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2012/05/01/the-dubious-red-wolf/
The black coloration comes from breeding with dogs. Dogs and wolves much more readily interbreed than wolves and coyotes and coyotes and dogs. Black coyotes are quite rare by comparison, and their black color comes from dogs, too.
The modern “red wolf” is almost entirely coyote in its genetic make-up, and it readily breeds with other coyotes.
I think the black color is the big smoking gun that the coyote-derived red wolves are not the same thing as the original wolves in the region.
Bartram is the one who coined Canis niger.
Audubon and Bachman are the first to talk about red phase wolves in Texas, but they were very clear that it was just a color phase, not a distinct species at all.
I agree, the “red wolves” of today are not the same animal; they are more coyote than anything else. I just wonder if the black coloration of the earlier animals was also a result of interbreeding with dogs, or a naturally-occurring color mutation within that subspecies. The darker coloration would have been excellent camouflage in the Southern swamps.
I should have read the post at your link before I replied. Your reasoning makes perfect sense. But melanistic mutations do occasionally occur naturally, within wild populations (leopards come to mind). I guess we’ll never know for sure, since Canis lupus niger is apparently extinct as of several decades ago.
Yeah they certainly do, but it’s been revealed that the black coloration in wolves today comes from dogs.
Furthering that case, Bartram saw wolves with white spots on the chest and mentions those that were black and white, also indicative of dog ancestry.
The black color may not have been camouflage. The gene that causes melanism is also related to immune response. Perhaps the southern swamps were so full of bacteria and other pathogens that there was a strong selection pressure for the immune gene, which just so happens to be the one that causes melanism.