Posted in wildlife, wolves, tagged antler evolution, Elk, North American elk, wapiti, wolves, Yellowstone wolves on December 23, 2018|
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We don’t really think of antlers as being practical weapons. No species of deer that has them has them year round, and in only one species, caribou/reindeer, do both sexes have antlers.
We tend to think of antlers as being used to attract the opposite sex and for ritualized combat between conspecifics, usually just competing males during the rut in all species but caribou/reindeer. In that species, the females retain antlers well into the winter, which they use fight for preferential feeding areas, a great asset in feeding the calves they carry through the long northern winters.
But we don’t normally think of them as weapons to be used against predators. After all, predators are a problem that plagues deer all year, not just during the rut, and if they were widely used in fighting off predators, one would think they would evolve to hold onto them permanently or at least for longer periods of the year.
Well, a recent paper in the journal Nature examined how these factors work with regard to elk living in Yellowstone, where wolf predation is a significant factor in elk survival.
The authors found that bull elk that lose their antlers relatively early tend to be in better physical condition than those that retain them, and those that lose their antlers early tend to grow larger antlers than those that retain them, simply because they have more time to grow their new antlers in the coming year.
The authors found that there is a massive trade-off for how long elk hold onto their antlers. Those bull elk that lose their antlers are preferentially targeted by wolves. Yes, even though they are in better physical condition than those that retain them, the wolves go for elk that lack antlers as weapons.
Predation from wolves could be driving elk in Yellowstone to hold onto their antlers longer, and it could explain why elk in general hold onto their antlers long after their breeding season.
This study has some interesting implications, because wolves could indirectly be selecting for smaller antler size in elk, simply because the elk that lose their antlers sooner tend to have bigger racks in the following year. Further, because the elk hold onto their antlers longer when they are in poorer physical condition, the wolves could be selecting for weaker elk that are much poorer foragers than they might otherwise be.
These questions were not addressed in the paper, but I’m sure the questions did arise as the researchers looked at their data. More work is going to have to be done, but it is clear that wolf predation is a lot more complex in how it selects for fitness in the elk population than we might have assumed.
Posted in deep thought, tagged Don Blankenship on December 23, 2018|
The sun rises over his mansion. He stands outside and picks up the morning paper and squints his puffy fat eyes into the glowing eastern sky. He glowers back at the horror of sunshine, then slowly slips back into his castle for another day of conspiracy theorizing on Facebook. He believes himself a nobleman, benighted one, one left in exile from the hilly country of realm, where the black seam is dug and sun glints in only when the winter clouds dissipate.
In truth, he is no more a nobleman than he is a mobster. A big boss man of a coal giant, he made himself rich and powerful at the expense of his skilled workers who toiled in his mines. He killed water supplies and whole ecosystems in the wake of his avarice. He added a sort of toxic accelerant to the corrupt politics of West Virginia, making what was already vice even more disgustingly sleezy. Democratic politician knelt to kiss his ring, but he grew tired of pretending he cared for anything to do with their party. So he built the modern right that took over West Virginia, and anyone who wanted to be anybody came to seek approval before the throne.
His name is Don Blankenship. He was born to a single mother in a rundown house in the rundown town of Delorne. They had no running water, the outhouse was their refuge for the refuse of life, and had he been born in in 1900, he might have been a raging radical of the left. For Delorne lies in that land of Mingo, where the radical miners marched and took up arms against the coal company police state that held them in debt peonage and held away all that idea of the unions from the workers. But one time, the miners marched, native-born miners who tanged the Queen’s English as they always had in this and of hollows joined their arms with those who spoke with Irish brogues, African American dialects, and accents of Italian, Czech, and Yiddish.
But he was born a generation that was beginning to see the end of it all. The mines were being played out, and the unions were an obstacle to company profit.
He worked his way through the poor public schools of the county and learned his craft in trapping muskrats. From their hides, he paid his tuition to Marshall University, where the studied accounting. Accounting is study of numbers and yields, and although never a star student, he made his passing grades. He worked in the mines some, but he never once learned solidarity with those who toiled. He wanted more than that. He wanted to be the boss man.
Muskrate trapping is funny business. It is something akin to the beaver trapping that made men brave this territory to make their fortunes back in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. You come up with ways to make the muskrats drown, or lacking such abilities, you use traps that grip the body and suffocate them to death.
And so trapper Don worked the creeks and the streams, still wild with muskrats, even after all those years of pollution from sewage and mining. The muskrats gave their lives to fill his pockets and pay his fees and rise him up into a better station.
A man of numbers and figures, Don became the McNamara of the mines. He rose higher as he filled the company coffers, and he broke those pesky unions. And one day, he became CEO of Massey Energy.
And then set about becoming the caudillo of the coalfields. He threw his money at the politicians, and the politicians danced. He was the king maker, and everyone feared him.
How many people died because of his avarice is difficult to account. Cancer from the bad water poisoned from the mines is took quite a toll. Bad lungs were epidemic among all miners, but where the dust spread all day, the lungs of the citizenry grew black too.
And for his murine benefactors not much good came from it all. Muskrats don’t do well swimming in cancer creeks anymore than people do drinking for them.
How many people died in his mines in disasters and workplace safety errors, well, is also up to conjecture. Let’s just say it wasn’t zero, and in the end, it would his avarice overriding the need for safety that would do him in.
But he ran riot as the kingmaker. He helped Karl Rove deliver West Virginia to George W. Bush in 2000, when the state had such a long tradition of never voting for nonincumbent Republicans for president that went way back to when Herbert Hoover lost to Roosevelt in 1932.
And realizing the political winds were changing, he set about using his money to build a Republican Party in West Virginia, but it would not be one based upon the traditional conservative ideals of respect for institutions and skepticism of populism. No, it would be built on the reactionary populism that Don Blankenship saw as own sort of “American competitionist” ideology.
He called himself a radical, and in one election cycle, he got his own hand-picked Republican supreme court justice elected—“For the sake of the kids,” was his campaign slogan, accusing the incumbent Democrat of being too easy on a child molester and of being a Marxist to boot.
“For the sake of the kids” became the rallying cry for this Blankenship-based Republican Party to take the state legislature in 2006. Republican candidates ran with his blessing. He pumped their campaigns full of cash. But that cash really began to stink by then, and his slate of radicals all lost.
And thus began the twilight of the caudillo of the coalfields. He continued as the CEO, but environmental protestors were onto him. He had already poisoned the Tug River when his company’s Martin County, Kentucky, slurry impoundment escaped its banks. Water was tainted, and so became Mr. Blankenship.
In the end, Blankenship’s desire to keep the mines “running coal” at the expense of all safety brought him in. An explosion at the Upper Big Branch mine took the lives of 29 good, hard-working miners. Obama was president. Joe Manchin was senator. Obama’s MSHA did its job. It fingered Blankenship’s disregard for safety as the main reason for the explosion. He allowed the ventilation system to malfunction, and miners were forced to work where the coal dust, methane, and carbon monoxide levels were allowed to build. He wanted the coal run. He needed more money. More money was more important than their lives.
He was prosecuted for his crimes, but he was found guilty of only a misdemeanor, conspiracy to violate mine safety regulations. The judge still put him in federal prison, a club fed sort of place in California.
There, he had time to stew over the conviction. He wrote a book defaming Obama’s MSHA as the real culprit behind the explosion. He drew harder on right wing conspiracy theories about how the world really works
And when freed from prison, he instantly set about making a documentary that relied heavily on this narrative, which had played on local television stations in West Virginia. By that time, West Virginia had decided that Obama was the cause of all its woes, and a certain portion of the public became receptive to his insane bellyaching.
West Virginia loved Donald Trump, voting for him by the second highest margin of any state in the union. Coal-mining Wyoming held the distinction of being Trump’s number one state. But Blankenship saw how Trump had played that victim card very well to win the presidency, and he knew that he could pay that card even better when he threw his hat in the ring for the Republican nomination of US Senate. He would be taking on what he thought of as the New Jersey-based Republican establishment that had gained control over West Virginia’s GOP. In truth, all that had happened is some New Jersey right wingers had been unable to get elected in their home state went to West Virginia to launch more successful political careers. Among them was Patrick Morrissey, the state’s attorney general, who had decided he also wanted Joe Manchin’s senate seat.
The Republican establishment in Washington wanted Evan Jenkins, a turncoat Democrat who had once been in the state senate but had managed to win a seat in congress as a Republican. His former Democratic bona fides haunted him all through the campaign.
It was a campaign based upon Blankenship’s id gone made. He stole Trump’s thunder in giving his opponents nicknames. Evan Jenkins became “Little Joe,” as if he were Joe Manchin’s doppelganger. Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell became “Cocaine Mitch,” a reference to the discovery of cocaine on one of McConnell’s wife’s family’s ships. He also called him a Swamp Captain and pledged his undying loyalty to Donald Trump. He played ads asking that they lock Hillary Clinton up for colluding with Russia, and he played the race card hard. He said that Mitch McConnell’s father-in-law was a “wealthy Chinaperson” and implied that McConnell only cared about making China great again.
Despite being the uber Trump in that race, he still lost to Morrisey. He still won a few really rural counties, where conspiracy theories are the main currency of the local GOP apparatchiks. He lost this race because Trump himself tweeted out that Blankenship couldn’t win, and instead of turning on Trump. Blankenship turned on the Republican Party.
He hired his production crew to make more crazy ads. He came up with a conspiracy theory that Patrick Morrissey’s New Jersey political operatives worked together with a Fox News host from New Jersey to ruin his campaign. He was so angry with it all that he changed his registration to the Constitution Party, which then offered him their nomination for the US Senate seat. He filed signatures with the West Virginian secretary of state, telling his followers that if he got rejected from the ballot it was only because the establishment of both parties was trying to stop him. Of course, what was actually against him was the state’s sore loser law, which prevents people who lose a primary to run as another party or an independent as a balloted candidate for the general election. The state supreme court threw out Blankenship’s complaint when he was denied ballot access by the secretary of state, and he raced to Facebook too whine to his followers about how the world was truly against him all that was right in the world.
Morrissey lost the general election. Blankenship is still filing with federal courts to get his conviction overturned. He has millions of dollars and greedy lawyers who will gladly take some his fees.
And he has his mansion in Nevada and his Chinese girlfriend, but he doesn’t have the power over the land of coal anymore. It sears his very soul to know this fact, for like Donald Trump he is a man who feels deeply insecure. He knows deep down that his money came from being an amoral, avaricious prick, and he knows he has done wrong. But he cannot look himself in the mirror and accept this fact and fully accept his exile.
I suspect he’ll try running for governor of West Virginia, or maybe if Donald Trump gets impeached, Don will throw his hat in the ring for the Republican nomination for president. It aches himself from the inside out that he cannot be the caudillo anymore, and if he can’t be the caudillo, maybe he can be the illustrious potentate of the whole nation. If only those mean ol’ liberals and Swamp Captains would just lay off him.
And so the benighted and exiled wannabe nobleman is left to his Nevada mansion to writhe the convulsions of his conspiracy theories. Perhaps he portends of the future for Mr. Trump, who also knows his own money largely comes from even more dubious means than sweatshop coal-mining and whose fortune is likely protected from the government’s levy by even more dubious tax schemes. Mr. Mueller or Maxine Waters are on the hot trails of all these potential liabilities, which are even more likely than his Russian collusion connections. And he must agonize all the live-long day that these liabilities could be exposed at any moment.
But I cannot help but reflect a bit upon myself. Like Blankenship, I am fully estranged from West Virginia politics. At one point of my life, I wanted to work in politics down there. I wanted to be fighter for the little guy, the ones whose lives were ruined by people like Don Blankenship. I got a degree in political science, and I went to law school to be a people’s tribune. I became instantly alienated from ever having any hope in that profession the second I stepped into law school, for I felt lost in all the esoteric nonsense about property inheritance in wills and what was a tort and what wasn’t. I suppose that deep down, I wanted to do politics because I loved the story and the drama, but I would never make it as an attorney.
And I cannot even feign a breath of Trumpish conservatism, nor can I pretend to be religious. By the time I was 23, I had intellectually rejected all theses of Christianity, but I was too afraid to admit to myself or others. And I certainly couldn’t play games as mainstream evangelical Christianity prostrates its before the altar of Donald Trump. I couldn’t hold my tongue and avoid saying that Trump is a horse’s ass, a violation that would probably cost me a Democratic nomination for virtually any office In virtually every part of the state.
I never had any hope of being a kingmaker or a people’s tribune. I accept that my native land and I will be forever politically estranged. And in this, I suppose I have more awareness than Mr. Blankenship, and it certainly cannot sear my soul the way it clearly does to him.
And so the tragic burlesque that is West Virginia politics goes on. Can a difference ever be made? Maybe, but for someone as melancholic as me, it is best that I let go and move on to safer station, where I can watch the whole scene in psychological safety.
That is where I am right now. The evening sun in December pierces the clouds. The gray skeleton trees glow glumly in their grayness. Not much snow this far in this greenhouse winter. Only the disgusting, nasty mud, and the chill rain fall from the sky. The arctic is warmer this winter. Don Blankenship made some of that all possible. He won’t admit it. He denies it like all his guilty sins.
And America goes on in ruins, but maybe there is hope. There has to be. I cannot allow myself to think otherwise.
Posted in dog domestication, wolves, tagged Active Social Model of dog domestication, Alpha, Czechoslovakian vlcak, Czechoslovakian wolfdog, dog domestication on December 22, 2018|
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I finally got around to watching Alpha, a film that depicts a fictionalized account of dog domestication. It is set 20,000 years ago in Europe, which means that it posits a European origin for the domestic dog, and because of this early date, it sets domestication in the time of Paleolithic hunter-gatherers.
The events in the film are backed in at least some of the literature on dog domestication. The oldest dog subfossil remains in existence that are not hotly debated as to belonging to a dog and not a wolf are the Bonn-Oberkassel dog, which dates to around 14,000 years ago. Yes, that’s about 6,000 years later than the events in Alpha, but we do have that paper positing European origins for the domestic dog that suggests an even older domestication event on that continent.
So it is potentially possible for the events in Alpha to be in keeping with some of the literature on dog domestication.
The film’s protagonist is Keda, who speaks a language that is called Solutrean, which is the name archaeologists have given to an industry culture in some parts of Paleolithic Europe. Because of the similarity between spearpoints from this Solutrean culture and some aboriginal North American peoples from roughly the same time period, some experts posited that European hunter-gatherers came across the North Atlantic following marine mammals along the ice flows, suggesting a European origin for some North American native people. Of course, this hypothesis has been dumped in light molecular data that show a Siberian origin for the indigenous people of the Americas.
Keda is the son of a Solutrean chief who wants his son to be a powerful and skilled hunter of big game, especially steppe bison, which are his people’s predominant prey species. Keda, though, is a bit soft with quarry. He refuses to finish off a wild boar that has been speared, and his father takes great umbrage with his temerity when it comes to the kill. But this is Keda’s first big hunting expedition, and his father really wants to teach his son the ways of his craft.
This world is not meant for those who cannot be crafty and tough. While sitting at a campfire, a cave lion absconds with one of the men. A memorial cairn is placed where the lion took the man, and they move on in search of meat in the hoof in a way that shows they accept their mortal fates in such a hostile environment. So Keda’s softness and excessive empathy might not be well-matched for such a lifestyle.
The hunting expedition reaches its climax when tribesmen and their close allies come across a herd of steppe bison. They stalk them in close, and they use their spear throws to drive them towards a cliff. Many fall off the cliff and die, and the Solutrean tribes can have their meat and hides and bones for another year. However, as they drive the bison off the cliff, one unusually recalcitrant one charges Keda and lifts him up with its horns and throws him off the cliff. He falls to a rock outcropping, where the tribe is forced to leave him for dead. A cairn is left in his memory on the cliff face, and his father and the hunters leave him to the ages.
It is at this point that film begins to play around with artistic license. Keda awakes when a griffon-type vulture tries to scavenge his carcass, and when Keda realizes that he is just resting on a ledge, he tries to climb down the steep cliff side with his badly injured leg. At that point, it starts to rain and the ravine below the cliff fills with water. He then jumps into the torrent below. Miraculously, he survives the fall and the rushing water, which I found a bit implausible. He then put his wounded leg back in order and begins looking around for a bit of food and shelter.
While he limps around, a pack of wolves shows up, but he manages to fight them off with the spearheads he’s carrying on his clothing and escape in a tree. He badly injures one of the wolves, which lies wounded beneath the tree.
I should note here that I am quite skeptical that Pleistocene wolves were particularly dangerous to people. As I’ve noted before, the wolves of Ellesmere and Baffin Island, which have never been intensely persecuted, are unusually curious and socially open with people. It seems to me that Eurasian wolves living 20,000 years ago would have had a similar curiosity about people, and thus, they would have been relatively easy for people to habituate them to our presence. I don’t think that an animal that was a much a threat to people as cave lions would have been trusted at all, and there would have been little of the empathy between people and wolves that could have led to any kind of partnership.
The empathy that Keda showed the boar, though, begins to cast upon the injured wolf. He muzzles the wolf and carries it to a cave, where he puts maggots on its wound to eat out any infection. He feeds the wolf a bit of the rabbit he manages to kill, and although the wolf is growling and surly through their initial interactions, the wolf eventually comes to trust Keda and within just a few scenes becomes as tame as any dog. Again, this is artistic license, but I think even those socially open wolves from the Pleistocene would still have had clearly-defined boundaries. They might have been friendly with people, but it is unlikely that they would have become that trusting at the first point of contact.
However, this part of the film does fit nicely with the recently posited Active Social Domestication Model in which human social interactions with wolves are the main catalyst behind creating the domestic dog. This model is relatively new, but it has a lot of explanatory power, especially when compared to the Coppinger Model, which just posits that scavenging wolves in at the middens Neolithic camps begat neotenic village dogs that were later selected for their working and hunting abilities and became the breeds of dog we have today.
Keda eventually realizes that the wolf is not going to leave his side, so he begins to show it even more empathy. He gets an idea that he could train this wolf to help him the hunt, and there are several scenes where he teaches the wolf to do commands. I doubt that this happened very much early on the domestication of the wolf, especially if we are to assume that humans and wolves developed a hunting symbiosis.
Indeed, the way Keda hunts with the wolf Is awfully unlikely. He uses the wolf to herd and flush wild boar, which he kills with a spear. Wolves can hunt wild boar that way, but it seems to me that the best way to use a wolf is as a “bay dog,” in which the wolf circles and distracts the quarry, holding it in one place so that a spear can be thrown.
Keda names the wolf “Alpha,” though he uses the Solutrean word for the term, and the two begin their journey to Keda’s home grounds. On their way, the man and wolf develop a tight bond. They play at the lake together, just the same way we would with our own dogs.
One night, a pack of wolves shows up at Keda’s campsite, a black wolf lures Alpha away from Keda. The black coloration is interesting, because it is quite rare in modern European wolves. It has only been introduced to wild wolves in modern times through crossing with dogs, including in North America where it was introduced to wolves from a dog living in either the Yukon or Northwest territories several thousand years ago. What we do know, though, is that this black coloration, which is conferred in wolves and is most dog breeds through a dominant allele, originated first in the population that led to domestic dogs.
As Keda makes his way back, the Pleistocene winter sets in. He now must travel without much food through the driving, blinding snow. Through a series of misadventures, he finds himself falling through the ice on a lake, and Alpha hears his distress and runs to rescue. The whole scene where the wolf comes to rescue Keda from the ice requires lots of artistic license, but it is visually spectacular.
Alpha and Keda are reunited and begin their long journey back to the home grounds. On their way, a pack of cave hyenas (a type of Pleistocene spotted hyena) chases them into a cave. Alpha and Keda await the hyenas in the cave. The snow piled up on the entrance of the cave quakes with their footsteps, but they do not enter. We soon learn the reason for their reluctance, a cave lion has been lurking deep with in the recesses of the cavern. It charges Keda and Alpha. Alpha fights the lion bravely, and Keda takes a deep breath and throws the spear, hoping it hits only the lion. It does, and Alpha survives, though pretty badly wounded. The lion provides some sustenance, and Keda and Alpha continue to make their way to the home grounds.
When Keda arrives home, he is quite ill, and he shows up with a very sick wolf on his mother and father’s doorstep. I can only imagine what it would have been like if such a scene had occurred in real life. If these people had no concept of partnering with a wolf, I bet their first compulsion would have been to club the wolf in the head for meat and fur. But Keda tells them they must care for Alpha too.
In the final scene, Keda is healed from his illness, and he sees a neonatal wolf puppy being held up by a priestess in an induction ceremony to the tribe. We then see Alpha nursing a litter of puppies. So, it turns out that after 90 minutes of film, we learn that Alpha is a female wolf. I wish there had been some mention the wolf’s sex earlier in the film, because I was honestly not prepared for the puppies.
The father of the puppies was apparently the black wolf, because one of the puppies is black, and thus, this detail would fit with the black coloration originating in the population that led to domestic dogs. The puppies grow up in the Solutrean tribe, and the final image of the film is the Solutrean hunting party going out on a hunting expedition with their wolves walking among them.
I will give this film props for doing quite a bit of research on some of the literature that puts dog domestication in the Paleolithic hunter-gatherer societies of Eurasia. It posits a possible origin for the domestic dog that came from the coming of age story of one of these Pleistocene hunters. However, the actual domestication of the dog from wolves in these societies had to have been a bit more complex than the film states. In one flashback of the film, Keda’s father discusses wolves howling around their camp and how men must behave like wolves if they are to be good hunters. Of course, the father uses the toxic memes of alpha wolves in both the canid and human society. I honestly could have done without either.
But this flashback does hint that these hunter-gatherer people had some empathy with wolves, and it is this empathy that humans had with wolves that allowed us to form this partnership. I am reminded very much of Schleidt and Shalter’s hypothesis that wolves showed man how to hunt ungulates in Eurasia more effectively.
Humans and wolves have sort of convergently evolved as cooperative hunters, and it is very likely that humans would have seen much of themselves in wolves. Plus, if Pleistocene wolves behaved like the wolves of Ellesmere, humans would not have feared them in the way they would have feared cave lions or hyenas. This is a large social carnivoran that hunts big game but does not typically target us, and those features provided just enough space curiosity, empathy, and even reverence to develop.
I think that the hunting symbiosis hypothesis for dog domestication is essentially correct, but I don’t think it came about because someone managed to tame a wolf and hunt with it. I think it simply happened because humans, as opportunistic hunters and scavengers, figured out that following wolves was a great way to get good fatty meat. Wolves constantly test ungulates by harrying them. Those that are healthy stand and fight. Those that are weak run. The wolves usually kill the weak ones. The healthy ones that stood to fight would have been easier targets for the spear, and the healthy ones are full of fat that our big brains need.
So we would have figured out that if we followed wolves we could get the good meat we needed to survive, and the wolves likely would have figured out that we were the ticket to getting an easier meal. We probably drove the wolves off the carcasses at first, but we probably left enough meat for the wolves get a lot of reward for their effort.
Further, reliance upon human societies would have allowed one wolf reproduction strategy to operate quite well. In wolf packs, a single mated pair does all the approved breeding. If another female gets pregnant, the main breeding female (sometimes called the alpha female) kills the puppies of the other female or steals them to add to her litter. Usually, this main breeding female comes in heat first, and her older puppies easily outcompete the other female’s pups.
But these females do get pregnant. That’s because on the outside of the pack territory, there are unpaired males roaming about. These females are usually the daughters of the main breeding pair, and because wolves have some inbreeding avoidance behavior and because their mother will beat them down if they try to mate with her mate, they will often try to mate with these unpaired males that roam outside the pack
One notable male wolf in Yellowstone, the so-called “Casanova,” wound up living most his life as an unpaired male that mated with these unpaired females. In the early days of the Yellowstone reintroduction, the main breeding females of several packs allowed these unpaired females to raise their litters. Prey was abundant and naïve, so there was no need to kill the pups of these females.
Keeping a single litter is a lot of work for a wolf pack, so there is a very strong need for the litters tying them down each year to be reduced to one or none. When you have more prey, these pressures are released.
It is very possible that humans provided a space for that Casanova strategy to work more often. Some of the first wolves that may have hooked up with humans on a more intimate basis could have been females that wanted to have their litters away from their murderous mothers, and humans could have felt empathy towards these female wolves, tossing them food and protecting them from predators while they raised their litters. Humans could have provided a space for wolves that bred this way to reproduce efficiently, and if you’re just mating with a male and not engaging in all the social suppression of estrus and litter culling and purloining behavior, genes can spread much more rapidly. Perhaps the wolves that had lessoned genetic tendency toward pair bonding behavior became the basis for the domestic dog, and these genes wound up swamping the entire population of wolves that became domestic dogs, which is why pair-bonding behavior is uncommon in most domestic dogs
So basing the domestication story upon a female wolf is pretty wise.
My other quibbles with the film have more to do with the depth of characterization. I never really got to know Alpha as a wolf or a dog or anything. She was just a straight-up heroic figure, but I didn’t find the whole process of her transforming from a predator that would hunt humans to an extremely dog-like wolf particularly believable. I also wanted better CGI of the cave lions and hyenas. I am a bit of a Pleistocene mammal nerd, and I really wanted more of them. But they are like phantasmal entities that lurk in as agents of death and nothing more. The writers did do quite a bit of homework on dog domestication, but I think they could have done more and pushed for an even more compelling narrative.
Finally, the “wolf” in the film is a Czechoslovakian vlcak, a breed of dog derived from Czechoslovakian working German shepherds and European wolves from the Carpathian Mountains. They were originally bred as an “improvement” to the working GSD of communist Czechoslovakia, but they never really got off the ground in that way. However, because they are mostly German shepherd and were selected hard for temperament, they are the most successful wolfdog breed ever produced. I do wonder, though, if people watching the film will realize that this breed is what was used to portray a wolf in the film. We are already going through a bit of a boomlet with Siberian huskies in North America, which is somewhat attributed to their wolfish features. If people do realize there is a breed of wolfdog that is recognized by many kennel clubs, then I can see this breed being mass-produced and sold to gullible people without much regard for temperament. This film gives the public this bit of information, then we could see lots of these dogs in shelters and pounds, which I’m sure no responsible breeders of vlcaks wants.
No, the performance of vlcaks in Alpha was not as compelling as Jed the wolfdog, but the public is now being exposed to this breed’s existence. It is something we need to think about very carefully.
I do give Alpha major props for trying to posit the origins of the dog within European hunter-gatherer societies and to give some credence to the Active Social Model for dog domestication, but in story-telling, I just couldn’t allow myself to follow that much artistic license with Keda’s miraculous escapes from danger.
Posted in dog domestication, wolves, tagged Canis familiaris, Canis lupus, Canis lupus familiaris, dog taxonomy on December 18, 2018|
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It’s not unusual for people who are trying to deny evolution or promote creationism or both, to come up with a common question:
“If evolution is true, then why don’t dogs have something that isn’t a dog every once in a while?”
This question would not be so much of a problem if we, who think we know better, would stop trying to create a species called Canis familiaris.
Canis familiaris made sense when we didn’t know what dogs were derived from, and it might have made sense if we thought there were hard and fast reproductive barriers between dogs and wolves.
[W]ithin the Old World clade, wolf and dog represent sister taxa. Therefore, suggestions that the dog or dingo are a separate species (Canis familiaris) (e.g., Crowther et al. 2014) would cause gray wolves to be a polyphetic taxon; and consequently, our results support dogs as a divergent subspecies of the wolf. This result has societal significance as legislation in some countries and regional governments consider wolves and dogs as distinct species restricting the possession, interbreeding, or the use of vaccines and medications in wolves or dog–wolf hybrids if they have only been approved for use in dogs. In this sense, analysis of evolutionary history informs law and veterinary practice, as dog lineages are nearly as distinct from one another as wolves are from dogs, and the justification for treating dogs and wolves differently is questionable.
The monophyly of the species is one thing that I think everyone should agree is worth preserving in any taxonomic system, but the genomes clearly show that if we create a special species for the dog or the dingo, we wreck the monophyly of Canis lupus.
I would also contend, perhaps a bit more controversially, that in light of a similar study of North American wolf-like canids’ genomes, that the coyote is also part of Canis lupus. This study found that gray wolves and coyotes have exchanged genes across North America and that gray wolves and coyotes last shared a common ancestor only around 50,000 years ago. That ancestor was probably an ancient Eurasian gray wolf that came into North America and evolved for a more generalist, jackal-like niche in the mid-latitudes of North America.
When someone claims that dogs are not wolves, they can only mean it in the same way that pugs are not Siberian huskies or that Great Danes are not dingoes. They are not wild Canis lupus, but they clearly are within that species, if we wish to keep the species monophyletic.
The reason why people want to claim a special species for the dog is because of Raymond Coppinger’s ideas still hold a lot of sway with people who wish to be learned about dogs. It’s not that everything that Coppinger said was wrong. It is what he was wrong about seems to be all that people know.
Coppinger argued that domestic dogs were obligate scavengers and thus must be placed as their own ecological species. An ecological species is the best argument for Canis familiaris. But it has limits for our understanding of evolution, and it can be turned into an absurd concept. For example, there are two sharp-tailed grouse subspecies that live in slightly different but adjacent habitat but do not readily interbreed. If we were to adhere to the same sort of species concept, then these two subspecies would have to be distinct species, even if it busted up the entire monophyly of the sharp-tailed grouse species.
Because the ecological species concept is muddled when comparing wolves to dogs and keeping an arbitrary Canis familiaris species destroys the monophyly of Canis lupus, it would make more sense to drop Canis familiaris entirely.
One could raise dogs to Canis lupus familiaris, but Raymond Pierotti and Brandy Fogg have argued in their book, called The First Domestication: How Wolves and Humans Coevolved, that there is no set of behavioral, physical, or physiological traits that define all dogs as a taxonomic entity. They instead argue that we should just call them “domestic Canis lupus,” in which they also group the dingo, which is “feral domestic Canis lupus.“
I remain agnostic about what we should call dogs, but Pierotti and Fogg’s quibbles are difficult to ignore. Perhaps we could have the subspecies for the dog, but there must be some acknowledgement that all we are doing is defining a domestic and feral population of a species.
If this blog post looks familiar, I wrote almost this exact same post in March, but I sometimes feel that I have to explain the very real scientific reasons why we don’t say that dogs are a unique species. It is not anti-science to do so, despite what Facebook dog experts tell you. If we want a monophyletic Canis lupus, then dogs have to be part of it.
Posted in wolves, tagged Algonquin Park wolves, black bear, fisher, Moose on December 15, 2018|
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Lots of footage of Algonquin Park’s wolves, which are heavily admixed with coyotes, even breeding with them now when both populations are relatively stable. You can really see the coyote influence in this wolves, for these are the closest thing to a population of 50/50 “coywolves” in the wild.
Posted in dog domestication, wild dogs, wolves, tagged Arctic wolf, Ellesmere wolf, gray wolf, Greenland wolf on December 15, 2018|
Gordon Buchanan hanging out with fully wild wolf named Scruffy on Ellesmere Island. These Ellesmere wolves and those of Greenland were recently found to be a very genetically distinct population of North American wolf.
Long-time readers of this blog know that I am particularly fascinated by studies on wolf DNA, and I was surprised that I missed this little gem that came out in PLOS Genetics last month.
The authors used 40 genome sequences of gray wolves, Great Lakes wolves, proposed Eastern and red wolves, and coyotes. The authors found further evidence to show that red, Eastern, and Great Lakes wolves are various mixtures of coyotes and gray wolves. The paper also found that all gray wolves derived in North America do derive from a single ancestral population and thus represent a single monophyletic clade within Canis lupus.
The most interesting part of this paper though dealt with the genomes of wolves from the Queen Elizabeth Island, the famous arctic wolves, which are known for their white coats and curious nature around people.
The authors found that there were three distinct populations, which the authors define as East Arctic, West Arctic, and Polar. The first two had some evidence of admixture with mainland gray wolves, but the ones defined as “Polar” did not.
The wolves whose genomes came back that distinct were from Ellesmere and Greenland, which are the most northerly distributed of all North American wolves. The authors found that these wolves are relatively isolated from other wolf populations, and they do not have much genetic diversity.
These wolves have long fascinated me. They are curious and even socially open with people, and I think could give us a clue about how wolves could have hooked up with people in those Pleistocene days.
But the discovery that they really are a genetically distinct population is also of great interest. Even more, we have full genomes from these wolves now, and maybe we can do a comparison study of these curious wolves that have never been intensely persecuted by man, normal gray wolves, and domestic dogs. Maybe we can see what sorts of genes dogs and these polar wolves share that do not exist in other wolves, and maybe we could find out that my hypothesis is correct.
This hypothesis is the one that states that the original wolves of Eurasia behaved more like these polar wolves than the timid and fearful wolves of lower latitudes. If these polar wolves share genes associated with tameness that are also associated with domestic dogs and their general behavior, then we might see evidence some evidence that the original wolf of Eurasia would have had the temperament that could have led to domestication.
But that will have to wait for another paper, which I am waiting for.
