Natural History

The Smithsonian Magazine has an interesting article with the very simple title “Should the Himalayan Wolf  Be Classified as a New Species?”

The article details the work of scientists who have gone around Nepal collecting DNA samples from wolf scat.  This is a difficult project, for wolves in this region have experienced quite a bit of persecution from man. Further, where they live is quite inaccessible.

The researchers have found that these wolves have some uniqueness in their mitochondrial DNA, and they have also found that they share some genetic markers with the African golden wolf.

This is all interesting stuff, but I would caution going out on a limb and creating a new species called Canis himalayensis.

The big reason is the studies that have  attempted to figure out where these wolves fit have base part of their calculations on an assumption that gray wolves and coyotes last shared a common ancestor about a million years ago. We know that from full genome comparisons that this assumption is faulty, and the most divergence between gray wolves and coyotes happened about 50,000 years ago.  The DNA studies have shown that the Himalayan wolf is closer to Holarctic wolf, as is the African golden wolf, which means that Himalayan wolves aren’t as divergent from Holarctic gray wolves as coyotes are.

I have argued many times on this blog that the best way to think of coyotes in light of the evidence of this recent divergence between gray wolves is to think of coyotes as a form of gray wolf, and I think the name for coyotes should be Canis lupus latrans.  It makes at least as much sense as Canis lupus familiaris for pugs and Yorkshire terriers.

Because of the coyote’s position in light of full-genome comparisons, I think that we really shouldn’t think of the Himalayan wolf as a distinct species. I have no problem with Canis lupus himalayensis.

I am quite open to the African golden wolf being recognized as a subspecies of Canis lupus. In light of the work performed on Himalayan wolves and the recent discovery that African golden wolves are almost entirely gray wolf in ancestry, I think this might be correct.

And if you use this species model for gray wolves, you wind up with amazingly phenotypically and behaviorally diverse species, which is reflected in both wild and domestic forms.

I find this a lot easier to deal with than this model that has all these different species described that wind up exchanging genes all the time, and then, because we have declared one form endangered, we get into culling all the hybrids.

We need full genome comparisons between African golden wolves, coyotes, Holarctic gray wolves, and Himalayan wolves to suss out fully what these exact relationships are, but it seems that all of these animals are much more closely related to each other than we initially assumed. We also need more comparisons of ancient wolf DNA, including DNA from the remains of the ancestral Mosbach wolves (Canis mosbachensis).

So there might be a new species of wolf in the Himalayas, but I don’t think the evidence is all there yet. And there are lots of reasons to be skeptical.

But I do think that a unique high altitude subspecies of wolf does exist in the Himalayas. It is very likely that African golden wolves and Himalayan wolves are genetic relics of what was once a more genetically diverse Canis lupus. These lineages have since been lost in the main Holarctic wolf populations, just as we have lost the lineage that led directly to the domestic dog in these wolf populations.

After going through the red and Eastern wolf taxonomic mess, we should be careful in assigning new species status for unique wolf populations, particularly when we are using only very limited DNA assays.