The “pied” color phase of Canis lupus.
One of the most interesting things I’ve come across as I’ve examined historical accounts of wildlife is the amount of taxonomic splitting that was accepted at the time.
In the old days, naturalists and explorers would either travel to remote locations or receive specimens from those locations, and they very often did everything to bend the evidence to conclude that whatever specimen they had either observed or had examined was somehow a unique species.
The animal we call the “brown bear” (Ursus arctos) comprises several suggested species of that era. In fact, it wasn’t that long ago that one could see texts referring to the grizzly subspecies as Ursus horribilis. We now recognize that the brown bear is species with a Holarctic distribution. Its various subspecies are now recognized as a very diverse single species, one that once ranged over almost all of Europe and Asia and the western half of North America from Mexico to Alaska.
As it was with bears, so it is with wolves.
As I noted in my post about the initial recognition of the red wolf, Audubon and Bachman did not regard the reddish colored wolves of Texas as a distinct species. They recognized that they were nothing more than a color phase of the endemic wolf subspecies that was found in Texas. (The current creature called a “red wolf” is actually what happened to remnant wolf 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 ancestry.)
Audubon and Bachman were in the minority among naturalists of that era.
In his Fauna Boreali-Americana (1829), the Scottish naval surgeon describes several wolf subspecies that are based on nothing more than the coat color. Today, we do not classify wolves just upon their coat color. Certain subspecies are most often white in color, while others contain melanistic, gray agouti and red agouti colors.
Among Richardson’s color-based subspecies are the white wolf (Canis lupus albus), “the dusky wolf” (C.l. nubilus), and the North American black wolf (Canis lupus ater), which he defines as something distinct from the Euorpean black wolf (Canis lycaon, a name that has recently been proposed for wolves from Eastern Canada that are a mixture of wolf and coyote ancestry.)
The best of the color-based subspecies is the “pied wolf” (C.l. stricte):
Wolves having black colours instead of gray, distributed in large patches on the sides, are sometimes seen in the fur countries, associated with the Common Gray Wolves. On the banks of the Mackenzie, I saw five young wolves leaping and tumbling over each other, with all the playfulness of the puppies of the domestic dog, and it is not improbable that they were all of one litter. One of them was pied, another entirely black, and the rest shewed the common gray colours. I was unable to procure a specimen of the Pied Wolf (pg. 68).
Richardson’s description wasn’t that helpful, so I had to look somewhere else to find a good description of a pied wolf.
I found in Audubon and Bachman’s Viviparous Quadrupeds of North America, Volume 2 (1851). On the section about the “White American Wolf,” two white wolves are described. One is listed as being completely white except for a black tip on the tail. The other is described as follows:
Light grey on the sides legss and tail; a dark brown stripe on the back, through which many white hairs protrude, giving it the appearance of being spotted with brown and white. This variety resembles the young Wolf noticed by Richardson, (p. 68) which he denominates the pied Wolf (pg. 157).
This color phase might be a juvenile wolf that will eventually turn white as it matured. Arctic wolves don’t turn fully white until they are about two or three, and many juveniles have a muddy appearance with some noticeable banding along the back. Even fully mature wolves can have this banding.
It also might be a description of what appears to be the transitional phase between the white and gray morphs. Black wolves apparently originated from dogs that crossbred with wolves, but white ones evolved without any contribution from domestic species. White wolves have classically been described to arctic and subarctic regions, but the white ones were also relatively common on the Great Plains, which is where Audubon describes them as being native. White color certainly would be of an advantage in arctic and subarctic landscapes, where the wolves could at least attempt to ambush their prey, but the reason for this color on the Great Plains is a bit more difficult to explain.
Perhaps it’s just that the wolves that colonized the Great Plains were derived from ancestors that were originally native to the arctic. The genetic evidence does suggest that this might be the case, and the new subspecies that have been described from it make this a definite possibility.
Considering how weak the evidence for the unique species status of the red wolf, it is somewhat amazing that overly imaginative conservationists from the late twentieth century didn’t try to contrive more species out of these color morphs.
It’s likely the white arctic type of wolf used to habituate much larger area than now and then were pushed towards the north . I haven’t checked this, but I suppose the wolves with white fur were very wanted prey, but also might have happened that the stronger sub-specie of grey wolf took space from it.
Do you happen to know if the Arctic Wolf is DNA -studied yet ? It differs in many points from the Eurasian type.
They are the same species but are specialized.
They ones on the high arctic islands of Canada haven’t been examined, as far as I know.
That much of specialation, as the Arctic Wolf has, may well show in the gene level. Also, that wolf may well be the sub-species the ancient inuits / innus used create their working breed.
To what I’ve studied, the white wolf seem to found in North America (and mostly in Canada) only . I have not found sources that would claim Fenno-Scandia had them (a source year 1832, saying there are no white wolves except albinos in Lappland; on the contrary blacks were common) :
http://books.google.fi/books?id=xE_PAAAAMAAJ&pg=PT63&dq=%22hvit+varg%22&hl=fi&sa=X&ei=pSrRT88g1PThBI-pydAP&ved=0CEoQ6AEwBA#v=onepage&q=%22hvit%20varg%22&f=false
Canis lupus albus are paler in color and approach the white of the North American arctic wolves.
It seems the Arctic Wolf has travelled from Asia only to America North, since it’s not present in Europe nor Russia.
Tho, in the tundra parts of Russia (covering parts of Europe to Jamal peninsula and Kamchatka) there’s the type called Tundra Wolf (Тундровый волк. See http://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%A2%D1%83%D0%BD%D0%B4%D1%80%D0%BE%D0%B2%D1%8B%D0%B9_%D0%B2%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%BA
It has soft-blondish colours (but rarely all-white) in his fur.
No wolf is a true white.
Even pure white wolves have banded agouti hairs in their undercoat. Scroll down: http://homepage.usask.ca/~schmutz/white.html
Samoyeds or Bjelkier have white undercoats.
Prior to DNA testing, splitting was popular if for no other reason than if you called something a new species you got to name it after yourself, your spouse, your kid or whatever– a form of immortality.
It’s still popular, but possibilty for DNA -testing has given it higher standards.. Our endless, compulsonary need for intellectual studying of the world around us. It won’t save us and it seems to be as instictive as any behavioral trait in an animal – we can’t help it, it just occurs.
Hell, they even split our own species if you go back a few hundred years
In 1753 David Hume wrote: “I am apt to suspect the negroes and in general all the other species of men (for there are four or five different kinds) to be naturally inferior to the whites.” I’m pretty sure there were still people who believed this, and used it to justify slavery, many decades later.
The Rev. John Bachman– with whom Audubon collaborated– was among the first people to argue that people from Africa were the same species as Europeans from a scientific basis.
He was a Lutheran minister in Charleston, South Carolina, where these ideas were not popular. During the Civil War, he just shut up.
I wonder if his contribution to Audubon’s text actually flavored how they viewed taxonomy.
I particularly love when sources say that Audubon and Bachman were the first to describe the red wolf. They were, but they didn’t describe it as a different species at all.
Great reference! Thanks.
Jeez, it would be nice if people who put Rev. before their names were as interested in science as Bachman was! For others, btw., the link directs you to an ebook that you can download for free.
My elementary biology training used the rule Bachman uses . . . and I would guess Audubon used as well. If their offspring are fertile, the parents are of the same species. This gets messy for plants and even messier for fungi and bacteria. But in the zoo kingdom, in which bisexual reproduction is the rule, it sure keeps the splitters under control.
regarding: If their offspring are fertile, the parents are of the same species — this might be a good rule if modified to say that if the offspring are fertile most of the time or if it were to specify that both male and female offspring would have to be fertile. Since evolution results in A diverging into B & C, there are those periods where B and C are still interfertile to some degree but not reliably so – hence lions/tigers etc. When they are almost but not quite absolutely separated, you get horse/donkey – there have been very rare cases of female mules being fertile. Using a modified definition, lions and tigers would be separate species (most male offspring are sterile) as would be horses, donkeys and zebras (most offspring are sterile). Wolves and dogs would be one species, but coyotes (apparently most coywolf males sterile) separate. This of course will only work for existing species – you can’t use the rule on fossils, so the issue of Neanderthal / H. Sapiens will always be contested (interbreeding is documented, but not if it was a case of only the females being fertile).
I had a coydog (Smooth Collie x Coyote) who was not only fertile but precociously so & had to neuter him at 4 months of age.
You are fooling, or are a fool, or are a blog-keepers troll. The Canis can’t breed until the puppiehood passed and no vet would sterilize a 16-weeks-old pup. Tell a better one.
Pediatric altering is pretty common in the US, Bridget. Puppies that go through the shelter system are often altered at eight weeks old. Many communities require higher licensing fees for dogs over six months that are intact.
No, I am not fooling, nor a fool, nor a troll. I have seen several puppies among wolf/dog hybrids who exhibited precocious mating activity, some from as early as 10 or 12 weeks of age. The vet who neutered my coydog sometimes spayed and neutered puppies and kittens as young as 8 weeks, with no discernible ill effects, except for one female Great Dane who had to be spayed due to injury: when a puppy is spayed at an early age, the long bones continue to grow for a longer period of time, and this puppy grew to tremendous height for a female Dane. At age 3 she was 33 inches at the shoulder.
Before you go accusing someone of lying or trolling, maybe do yourself a favor and ask a few questions. I’d have been glad to provide details.
While juveniles can’t actually breed at such young ages, it is quite common for puppies to show mounting behaviours with each other (both male and female). It’s just part of learning how to be a dog, like play-fighting, chasing, play-biting, and so on.
The wolf pictured appears to be no more than a variant of agouti or sable. The pale “harness markings” behind the shoulder are not uncommon. “Pied”, as I learned it, refers only to an aindividual that shows white body color with distinct patches or islands of color on the body, more or less surrounded by white.. The patches may be very large or very small or anything between. But perhaps there are other definitions.
Pied is just a word that Richardson used. It is different from the pied that Bartram used, which appears to mean what it means now.