I’ve received a few inquiries in the past day or so about a report by a panel of scientists funded by the US Fish and Wildlife Service that states that the current evidence suggest that the red wolf is a species and therefore needs protection.
I’ve not seen a single study look into the real red wolf and Eastern wolf problem, which isn’t that they are hybrids. It’s that even if we were to have definitive evidence that they were not, the genetic difference among gray wolves, coyotes, and these canids is tiny.
Indeed, the full-genome comparisons have all found that these animals are hybrids, but they are not hybrids between two species that have been distinct for a million or even 500,000 years.
The best estimate of the divergence between coyotes and gray wolves is around 50,000 years ago, which only slightly earlier than when all extant coyotes diverged and when all extant gray wolves diverged. The difference between a gray wolf and a coyote is best described as a difference of subspecies, and if red wolves are hybrids, they are simply crosses between two subspecies. And if they are not, they are not that genetically different from coyotes, which would be their closest relative, to be suddenly afforded species status.
The best way to think of these animals is a single behaviorally and phenotypically diverse species, which is even more reflected in the domestic form.
Until red wolf advocates deal with the real problem of the recent common ancestor of gray wolves and coyotes, I don’t think they have much of a case for their species status.
I have no problem with a coyotes being considered a divergent form of gray wolf. It is now accepted by most experts that domestic dogs are part of Canis lupus. It’s not really such a stretch to think of coyotes as being part of this species as well.
What this says about conservation of the red wolf is a bit more complicated. I am not for eradicating red wolves from the face of the earth, but I wish we were more realistic what these animals were. At the very least, introgression with Eastern coyotes should be accepted as a source for genetic diversity within red wolf populations and that crosses between red wolves and coyotes should be left alone in nature. Coyotes could be conferring on the quite inbred red wolves greater genetic diversity and perhaps useful alleles for dealing with life in a human-dominated landscape.
The red wolf was said to have derived from Canis edwardii, but it was then more appropriately placed as a descended of the Mosbach wolf.
But if the full-genome comparison study’s estimates hold, then we’re looking pretty silly here holding onto the red wolf as an ancient form of North American wolf.
If this calculation holds, the coyote also appears to have derived from the Eurasian gray wolf radiation, which means North America has lost all its original wolf-like canids that rose at the beginning of the Pleistocene.
That last survivor of that lineage was the dire wolf, which became extinct as the Pleistocene faded into the Holocene.
Indeed, it is better to think of red wolves as an Anthropocene form of wolf, one that is well-adapted to living in the humid subtropics and hunting white-tailed deer and raccoons.
So no I’ve not changed my mind on this question. My government, especially now, is often quite wrong.
And before you peg me as a person who is a science denier or opposed to environmental protection, just understand that I care about climate change and the protection of countless wild species. I think this species is quite problematic and that there are good scientific reasons to be skeptical.
And I think my idea of Canis lupus being a phenotypically and behaviorally diverse species is much better fit with our understanding of the species as it exists in the Holarctic.
