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by Scottie Westfall

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The really interesting thing about this “chupacabra”

June 11, 2012 by SWestfall3

It never ceases to amaze me about how poorly informed people are about the natural world.

Whenever someone runs into a wild animal that is hairless for some reason, the imagination starts running wild.  People start making claims that they’ve seen some sort of new species, perhaps an extraterrestrial or something from a secret government lab.

You often run into internet experts who swear that an animal can’t be merely a common animal with alopecia– “because it looks so different!”

Never mind that genetic studies clearly reveal the animal’s identity.  It must be something unique!

Most northern hemisphere mammals are pretty well-furred.

From a distance, we don’t normally see the animal’s musculature or physique. We don’t see how its ears fit into the skull.  We don’t see how the head is really shaped.  The fur hides that much.

When the fur is gone, all of these features are revealed, and they do make the animal look more bizarre.

My personal favorite of all these amazing new animals is the chupacabra.

Pretty much every chupacabra ever killed or described to science has turned out to be either a dog or a coyote.  In Puerto Rico, some might even be mongooses, which were introduced to control the rat population. On the  US mainland, some chupacabras have turned out to be raccoons.

But the vast majority of these chupacabras have turned out to be canids. Some have been red foxes, but they most usually have been coyotes or domestic dogs.

And when the animal’s skin can be tested for disease, it almost always turns out that Sarcoptes scabei is the culprit.  In short, these animals are hairless because of a severe case of sarcoptic mange.

The dead canid in the photo above is one two similarly afflicted individuals that were found in the vicinity of Cuero, Texas.

It was the second one to have its DNA analyzed. The first was found dead on a ranch in the vicinity of the town. DNA tests revealed that it was a coyote.

The second one was shot in roughly the same area, and it turned out to be a bit different. It had coyote mtDNA, but its y-chromosome was that of a Mexican wolf (Canis lupus baileyi).  Y-chromosome tests merely trace paternal heritage, so it is very possible somewhere along the way, a Mexican wolf mated with a coyote somewhere in that region. The offspring then bred back into coyotes, and through each generation, the wolf component of their ancestry became diluted.  But the Mexican wolf y-chromosome remained, even though these animals are coyotes.

Now, that finding is much, much more interesting than all the crap that has been written about these particular chupacabras from Cuero. The woman who collected these samples runs a website that is full of denialism about what these animals actually are. I am particularly enjoying her claim that the tracks of these animals don’t look like those of coyotes, even though the track pictured looks exactly like the coyote track I photographed two years ago.

To me, it’s a much more amazing find to discover that Mexican wolves have contributed a few genes to the Texas coyote population.

It’s a much more amazing discovery than anything people can imagine about these animals being a unique species, which some have suggested should be called a “Texas blue dog.” (I thought that was a political term!)

This animal is yet another example of the wondrous species complex that exists between Canis lupus and Canis latrans.

Trying to turn these animals into unique species really isn’t that different from what people have tried to do with the red wolf and the so-called Eastern wolf species. Both have ancestry from both wolves and coyotes, but that does not make them unique species at all.

If the case for the Eastern wolf and red wolf as distinct species is that terrible, the case for the Texas blue dog is even worse off.  Its blue eye and so-called “pouches” aren’t going to make any difference.

Coyotes can have blue eyes.

This one, I believe, was killed in New Mexico, where the coyotes are either free or almost entirely free of dog ancestry:

They actually can get bluer than this one. Coyotes may have a mutation that causes blue eyes that is entirely different from what causes blue eyes in domestic dogs. No one has performed any analysis to determine why coyotes, even those from populations that have not been known to cross with dogs, like the ones in the Southwest, sometimes have blue eyes.

As for the pouches, those are actually cysts called hygromas that develop when an animal spends so much time sitting on its haunches scratching its neck.  Which is exactly what we’d expect from an animal suffering from a severe case of sarcoptic mange.

Of course, Texas isn’t a place where knowledge about zoology should be expected. This is, after all, the state that attempted to  introduce creationist textbooks into the class room.

I’m not saying everyone in Texas is an idiot, but any state that would elect this guy governor has a large number of citizens who have issues with critical thinking.

The discovery of a coyote with a Mexican wolf y-chromosome is an amazing discovery. If we’ve found one coyote with this ancestry, there are likely many of them.

There are lots of questions to ask about these coyotes.  When did the y-chromosome enter the population? How widespread are coyotes with this ancestry?  These questions are very much worth asking.

After all, the Mexican wolf is the most critically endangered subspecies of wolf in North America, and although its former range included Texas, the exact limits of its historical range are not clear. There is some evidence that it occurred as far north as Colorado, and its range in Texas may have been more extensive than we currently estimate.

But we can’t ask that question when we’re trying to turn these animals into paranormal bloodsuckers.

I know that chupacabras get the headlines.

But we’ve actually found something quite interesting here.

The truth is actually much more amazing than anything our imaginations could contrive.

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Posted in cryptozoology, wild dogs | Tagged chupacabras, coyote, Cuero chupacabras, Mexican wolf, Texas blue dogs, Texas chupacabras | 10 Comments

10 Responses

  1. on June 11, 2012 at 5:21 pm massugu

    Animals w/ sarcoptic mange always look so sad and miserable. It really doesn’t take a genius to figure out that a hairless wild mammal in N. America most likely has mange. If one does that, then its a small intellectual jump to identifying said mammal.

    As for the Mexican Wolf Y-DNA in the TX coyotes–that is exciting news. Theoretically, the results of some smart crossing of these coyotes to pure Mexican Wolves could broaden the genepool for the remaining wolves and perhaps save the species.


  2. on June 11, 2012 at 5:43 pm Kate Williams

    I am glad you are on this story! It seems that pieces of it are scattered around in the most unlikely of places.


    • on June 11, 2012 at 5:49 pm retrieverman

      And a lot of what’s being said about it is actually whacko.

      This animal could not be confirmed for having sarcoptic mange because it had been dead too long before that test could have been performed.

      It likely had it, though.


  3. on June 11, 2012 at 6:18 pm DesertWindHounds

    Blue eyed coyote (graphic photos):

    http://www.predatormastersforums.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=1798732&page=1

    Weird colored (dead) coyotes:

    http://www.predatormastersforums.com/forums/ubbthreads.php?ubb=showflat&Number=605732


    • on June 11, 2012 at 6:33 pm retrieverman

      Very cool. A lot of these get their coloration from dogs.

      But coyotes are more genetically diverse than dogs or wolves, and you can get a lot of weird variance in them that may have nothing to do with dog genes.


  4. on June 11, 2012 at 6:18 pm Kate Williams

    Actually. I meant the coyote/Mex wolf story!

    I don’t see why that hairless gene couldn’t get loosed in other canids, ie coyotes. Maybe some do live until adulthood- except the ones I have seen have full dentition. (I don’t think we understand how the dentition works with the hairlessness). My best guess at the moment is that the hairless allele is activated during a brief range of time, when the hair- and teeth are just taking form. The hairless dogs still have hair follicles which produce a waxy substance and can get black heads and pimples, esp. during adolescence. I have heard claims that some hairless have good dentition, but have yet to see the proof, via photos.The photos I have seen of hairless dogs with good teeth are of dogs with a lot more hair on their faces than my dog has.There have been no secondary photos which show the dog as a whole.

    So mange seems to make more sense.


  5. on June 12, 2012 at 7:57 pm Peggy Richter

    while it’s possible that most odd colors in coyotes come from dogs, it may also be the case that various colors simply “occur” on occasion and persist in those areas where the color is not a detriment. The wolf comes in near total white to black (and while K black may come from the dog, it’s not clear that a black also does) and the “agouti” color can vary widely. I really wish someone would look at the DNA of these color morphs and find out if they do or don’t have identical to dogs or if the genes are different enough to indicate independent development. I’d still like to know why wolves don’t come in “calico” like the African wild dogs. The one coyote in the series referenced does look almost fox or dhole red.


    • on June 13, 2012 at 9:48 am massugu

      The historical record holds many references to color morphs among wolves. Is the same true of coyotes? If not, then logic would suggest that the current color morphs are more likely a result of admixture w/ dogs and wolves.

      But your right, its past time that the DNA (autosomal as well as Y and Mt) of any of these ‘oddly’ colored coyotes collected by hunters be tested. The potential benefit to to our understanding of genetics and evolution far outweighs the costs.


  6. on February 3, 2013 at 5:09 am NorthFlaFireFighter

    I found this article while doing some research on the chupacabra. I have to agree that the discovery of the coyote with the Mexican wolf y-chromosome is an incredible find. I also agree that there are, as there always has been, cases of misidentification that are due to distortion from disease. However, in this article, the author uses the words “almost” and “pretty much”. I expect much more from someone who would post an article like this. Which brings me to the sentence about creationist textbooks. The author’s disdain for the idea of creationism is obvious while I am for equal opportunity. If evolution is taught in schools, why not the idea of creationism? For that matter, why shouldn’t the Flying Spaghetti Monster be taught to children in schools?
    I am literally flabbergasted at the apparent level of the author’s intelligence. Perhaps I should have been a zoologist or a cryptozoologist instead of a fire fighter because the world’s need for brighter minds is painfully obvious.


    • on February 3, 2013 at 7:20 am retrieverman

      MY disdain for creationism is because it’s not a science.

      It’s just an attempt to take a mythology and polish it with the veneer of science– and then misrepresent what the science actually says.

      I’ve not seen a creationist claim that is cannot be described as either speculation or a total misrepresentation of a scientific finding. Sometimes, the misrepresentation is honest– they simply don’t understand it– or they are being deliberately misleading.



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