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Arctic fox walks more than 2,000 miles across the sea ice from Svalbard to Ellesmere Island

Posted in wild dogs, tagged , on July 2, 2019|

arctic fox crosses from Norway to Canada

The Guardian reports that an arctic fox has been documented walking 2,000 miles across the sea ice from Spitsbergen in the Svalbard Archipelago to Canada’s Ellesmere Island.

The vixen, a blue phase arctic fox, was collared with a tracking device on Spitsbergen. The Norwegian Polar Institute then followed her travels for the next 76 days. She wandered across the sea ice to Greenland, probably scavenging polar bear kills and catching sea birds. She then wandered across northern Greenland, eventually the sea ice again to settled on Ellesmere.

She traveled an average of 46.3 km per day, which is a little less than 29 miles day. On one day, she traveled  155 km or 96 miles across the ice sheet in Greenland.

Arctic foxes are significantly smaller than red foxes, which kill them where their ranges overlap.  The two species have hybridized in captivity, but the offspring are sterile. Arctic foxes are most closely related to the kit and swift foxes of North America, and they probably could produce fertile hybrids with them if they were ever given the opportunity.

Arctic foxes are not extremely dependent upon sea ice for survival, but the sea ice is useful for augmenting their diets in the winter, when they can follow polar bears.

Because it is unlikely that this fox’s journey is but a fluke, sea ice has been essential in retaining gene flow in the species across northern Eurasia and North America. More research must be performed on the genetics of this species, but it would surprise me if there wasn’t at least some gene flow across the arctic.

Arctic foxes are about the size of a toy dog, averaging 6-7 pounds in weight, but they are so well-adapted to long-distance travel that they can make such amazing journeys.

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The not-so-Himalayan arctic fox

Posted in evolution, wild dogs, tagged , , on January 12, 2019|

One of the things I like about paleontology is the often creative hypotheses that get postulated in its literature. However, there are certain ideas that need better fleshing out with regard to molecular data, and sometimes, the tendency toward parallel evolution in certain clades is not adequately addressed in some of the morphological analyses that the discipline is force to use.

Among these would be the claim that arctic foxes evolved in the Himalayas. The paper that postulates a Tibetan origin for this polar species was well-publicized, as was the attendant out of Tibet hypothesis for arctic mammals. I must admit a certain amount of skepticism of the entire hypothesis, because it seems a bit of a stretch that evolution in high altitudes in the middle of a vast continent would create a lasting evolutionary lineage that could then colonize regions to the far north of that continent. It seems to me odd that you would get something like a polar bear started in the Himalayas, then have it colonize the arctic as a near marine organism.

The authors of the paper posit a Tibet origin for the arctic fox, based upon the remains of Vulpes qiuzhudingi, a Tibetan fox that lived over 5 million years ago. The dentition of this fox strongly resembles that of the modern arctic fox, and therefore, the authors think that the arctic fox must have derived from either this species or one that is close to it.

The authors also think that the next oldest arctic foxes were found in the arctic 3-4 million years ago, which is also interesting.

Both of these claims are interesting because the molecular data indicate that the closest relative of the arctic fox is the swift fox of North America, and what’s more, the arctic and swift foxes shared a recent common ancestor that lived about 900,000 years ago. The molecular data indicate that what we call an arctic fox today derived from the swift in the North American arctic.

So what the authors likely found with Vulpes qiuzhudingi is a parallel evolution of a more carnivorous fox in the high altitude of Tibet 5 million years ago. It might be the ancestor of “arctic foxes” found in the arctic 3-4 million years ago, but they are not the same thing that goes by Vulpes lagopus today. It is also possible that these arctic foxes that are older than 900,000 years old are another parallel evolution of more carnivorous foxes in cold climates.

This tendency toward parallel evolution matches so much of what we know about about canid evolution, and why virtually everything one reads about canid paleontology and systematic morphology needs to be confirmed with molecular data.

So yes, I do appreciated the creativity of paleontologists to describe the fauna of the world as it once was, but that darn ol’ DNA messes up the flight of fancy so many times.

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Loose-skinned arctic foxes being bred in Finland

Posted in dog breeding, dog domestication, domestication, wild dogs, tagged , , on August 25, 2017| 3 Comments »

loose skinned arctic fox

The animal above is a super-sized blue phase arctic fox that is of a type being bred in Finland. The exposed haw is actually the result of being bred for super loose skin, a trait that those in the dog welfare community know very well. “Typy” shar pei and Neapolitan mastiffs are well-known sufferers from loose skin problems, but even a in breed that isn’t as exaggerated, like Clumber spaniels, this loose skin can lead to all sorts of eye infections.

This is a full-body shot of the Neapolitan arctic fox:

wrinkled fox

Why are arctic foxes being bred with such loose skin?

Well, that loose skin actually makes for a larger pelt and a larger pelt goes for higher price.  In nature, arctic foxes are quite small, much smaller than Boreal red fox subspecies, but the arctic fox in its winter fur is a much more valuable animal.

Both red and arctic foxes breed well in captivity, and they have been farmed extensively for their pelts. Captive red foxes come in many colors now, but the naturally-occurring silver phase was once the staple of fox pelt market. The arctic fox, especially its blue phase, is also quite valuable, but the smaller pelts mean they cannot compete with the silver phase reds.

These Finnish breeders have begun to produce large blue arctic foxes, some of which weigh 20 kg, and have very loose skin in order to make a much more profitable strain of arctic fox.

This development has several moral and ethical questions, as well as being something that those of us curious about dog domestication and evolution might find intriguing.

I should note that I am not anti-fur. I come from a long line of fur trappers, including my own paternal grandfather who used to trap red foxes to fund his union activities. He knew more about red foxes than anyone I’ve ever personally known, and he had a great appreciation for the species.

For some, the fact that these animals are being bred for fur is going to be the biggest ethical problem, but for me, it is the exaggeration in conformation that causes me greater worry.  When these animals are killed for their fur, it is done humanely. Finland is a leader in the humane treatment of animals, and killing fur-bearers on farms in a cruel fashion would not be allowed.  The standard practice is for the animal to be rendered unconscious, then electrocuted. (I don’t want to get into a long, drawn-out debate about these, because there are places where this practice isn’t followed. Finland isn’t one of them. )

But these foxes spent their entire lives with loose eyelids and a bulky conformation that puts an exorbitant amount of stress on their joints, and this truly is a welfare issue.

I see this as the main welfare issue of domestic dogs in the West. We’ve bred domestic dogs with such exaggerated conformation that we’re ultimately harming them, and the funny thing is these animal welfare sites that post shocking animal cruelty videos and images also generate web traffic with videos of cute little bulldogs and pugs with such shortened muzzles that they cannot breathe or cool themselves properly.

I find these loose-skinned arctic foxes appalling, in every way I find an extreme shar pei appalling.

And here I can agree with the animal rights activist. This is wrong.

But at the same time, my curious, scientific mind is intrigued. Fur farmed foxes are sort of parallel dog domestications.  Much has been written about the Belyaev fur farm experiments and what they might say about how dogs were domesticated, but the truth is virtually every fur farm breeding program for the various red and arctic fox phases is an experiment that could reveal some secrets about dog domestication.

It is amazing that we can selectively breed arctic foxes to reach the size of coyotes, and it is even more amazing that we can select for the loose skin in arctic foxes that we actively breed for in certain purebred dogs.

It would be interesting to get full-genome comparisons on these “monster foxes” and more typical arctic foxes.  Maybe the genetics are similar between these foxes and the super-sized and loose skinned domestic dog breeds we have produced.

If we are going to breed animals for agricultural purposes, we are going to have to do it humanely. I am certain the Finnish breeders of these foxes believe they have done a great agricultural improvement in much the same way their intellectual forebears in England in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries bred massive swine and beef cattle that could barely walk on their own hooves.

So yes, we have an ethical issue with these foxes, just as we have an ethical issue with the continued breeding of dogs with exessive loose skin and exposed haws.

 

 

 

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What is the story of these three foxes?

Posted in Taxonomy, wild dogs, tagged , , on July 11, 2016| 3 Comments »

arctic fox, swift fox kit fox

Canid taxonomy and evolution have long-stand ining debates, but one I don’t think has been discussed much is the evolution of the arctic fox-kit fox-swift fox clade.

For most of my life, there was always a long standing debate as to whether kit foxes and swift foxes are distinct species. The current thinking is the they are distinct but closely related species with a very narrow hybrid zone in parts of Texas and New Mexico.

And for most of my life, arctic foxes weren’t even considered part of the group. Indeed, they were considered so different from other foxes that they were placed in their own genus (Alopex).  We’ve since discovered that arctic foxes have mitochondrial DNA sequences that are very similar to swift and kit foxes, and in terms of their mtDNA, they are as distinct from kit and swift foxes as they are from each other.

Since then, arctic foxes have been classified within genus of “true foxes” (Vulpes), with the arctic fox being V. lagopus, the kit fox as V. velox, and the kit fox as V. macrotis.

Broader genomic analysis has revealed that the arctic fox is actually quite closely related to the kit fox, and analysis of mitochondrial DNA suggests that arctic and swift foxes diverged only 250,000 years ago. If similar results are confirmed in nuclear DNA comparisons, it means that these foxes diverged from each other after Old World and New World red foxes split.  A recent genome-wide study revealed that red foxes from North America diverged from those of the Old World 400,000 years ago, and in recent decades, it’s generally been accepted that red foxes are the same species. (There is currently a move to split them into two species).

Now, it’s pretty obvious that a similar study needs to be performed on swift, kit, and arctic foxes, and there is actually an obvious question that one of these studies could answer:

Are arctic foxes polar-adapted swift or kit foxes or are swift and kit foxes arctic foxes that have adapted to the Great Plains, Rockies, and arid regions of the West?

Arctic foxes are found in the arctic of North America and the arctic of Eurasia.  They come in two basic phases: white, which sheds out to brown and white in summer, and blue, which sheds out to blackish gray in summer and is gray-tinged in winter.

Arctic foxes could be descendants of swift or kit foxes that wound up adapting to a polar environment, which then allowed them to access the Old World. However, there is a paleontology study that says arctic foxes evolved in the Himalayas.  I am a bit skeptical of this study, because it seems to contradict the genetic data that connects arctic foxes with swift and kit foxes of the Americas.

However, if swift and kit foxes are temperate-adapted arctic foxes, then it could be possible that arctic foxes did evolve in the Himalayas. They came across the Bering Land Bridge, and then some of them became isolated in environments that became more moderate in climate, and they lost their adaptations for changing their coat colors. After all, least weasels, long-tailed weasels, and stoats (ermines or short-tailed weasels) have some populations where the animals turn white in winter, and populations where they don’t.

It could be that this is the real difference between arctic and swift/kit foxes is they just represent divergent populations where some populations turn white and some don’t. We only think of them as separate species because they are quite geographically different from each other.

It also could be that these animals are actually more genetically distinct from each other than we’re currently thinking, but preliminary genomic analysis suggests a very close relationship between kit and arctic foxes.

And those two are much more geographically isolated from each other.

So we do know that these three fox species do form a clade within the Vulpes genus, but how they exactly fit together is a good question. Maybe they actually are more closely related to each other than Old and New World red foxes. Maybe they aren’t.

And we don’t know which type came first.

But we can answer these questions, and we can answer them the same way we figured out that red foxes in North America aren’t derived from English imports from the colonial period.

This is a study that I’m pretty sure will be done but just hasn’t yet.

 

 

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“A Tale of Two Foxes”

Posted in Carnivorans, wild dogs, tagged , on October 15, 2015| 2 Comments »

tale of two foxes

This photo showing a red fox killing an arctic fox was taken at Wapusk National Park in northern Manitoba. The photographer, Don Gutoski, is a physician at an emergency room, but his amateur status didn’t stop him from being named 2015 Wildlife Photographer of the Year f by BBC Wildlife and the National History Museum.

The photo is an epic demonstration of climate change’s effects on an ecosystem. Red foxes are expanding their range north into arctic fox range, and red foxes in those northern regions are known for eating other foxes when they come across carcasses. It’s doesn’t take much for them to start hunting the little arctic foxes, the polar jackals that follow the great white bears across the sea ice.

With climate change, red foxes can come north into areas where they weren’t before, and this is bad news for the arctic fox.

This predation has fascinated me quite a bit. Check out my previous posts:

These two species actually have produced sterile offspring in captivity, but it should be noted that they aren’t that closely related. Red foxes originated in the Middle East. Their closest relative is Rüppell’s fox. Arctic foxes are have been said to have an Old World origin, but their closest relatives are the swift and kit foxes of North America.

So climate change has thrown these two lineages together, and it’s not looking good for the specialist polar jackal.

And this photo is so amazing. I’m glad Don Gutoski was able to capture it, and I’m quite pleased that he is being recognized for it.

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American soldier with pet arctic fox, 1943

Posted in Invasive species, wild dogs, tagged , , on January 11, 2013| 5 Comments »

american soldier with pet arctic fox 1943

This photo has been making its rounds on the internet as a photo of an American soldier from World War II with his pet wolf pup. The location is given as “Alaska” and the year as “1943.”

Of course, this animal isn’t a pet wolf at all.

It’s an arctic fox.  Arctic foxes are notoriously easy to tame, and it would make sense that a soldier serving during World War II would have tamed one.

My guess is this soldier was serving in the Aleutians. I’ll even go as far as to suggest that he was likely serving in the liberation of either Kiska or Attu in the far western Aleutians, which were actually invaded by Japanese forces in 1942. These islands were retaken in the spring of 1943, and US forces remained there for the remainder of the war.

Both of these islands were home to large numbers of arctic foxes, which were introduced by the Russian.

These foxes have been eradicated on both islands, but at the time, they were quite numerous. Arctic foxes became infamous for destroying colonies of sea birds that used the Aleutians for nest purposes.

For thousands of years the birds nested on the islands because they were free of terrestrial predators.

The Russians then introduced arctic foxes as fur-bearers.

For whatever reason, the Russians have tended to believe that it’s a good management practice to introduce fur-bearers anywhere they please, which is the reason Europeans have to worry about things like North American muskrats and Asian raccoon dogs.

It was not necessarily a Soviet practice.

It’s just been a Russian practice in general.

Of course, we Anglo-Saxons aren’t much better. We’ve introduced foxes to Australia because chasing wombats with hounds was never that great a sport.

At least the Russians introduced animals for fur purposes and not petty sport. Russians actually do use fur. In many parts of Russia, it’s impractical to keep sheep and the lack of good transportation infrastructure meant that cotton and wool textiles could not easily be distributed across the country.  It was a better practice from a human perspective to keep large numbers of fur-bearing animals stocked in many different regions. That way, people would have access to good quality materials from which to make garments in order to keep warm. In Russia, fur was not murder. Fur was survival for many people living in isolated communities in very cold regions.

But although the introduction of fur-bearers makes sense from a human perspective, it can have disastrous ecological consequences.

The only part of the US “home territory” ever to have been invaded and occupied during World War II were these two islands in the Aleutians.

We liberated the islands of the invaders, and this soldier was likely involved in those liberations.

But the great irony is that having been involved in driving out those invaders, he decided to make friends with an invader that wound up nearly destroying the entire Aleutian Island nesting sea bird population.

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How should we classify arctic, swift, and kit foxes?

Posted in Carnivorans, wild dogs, tagged , , on February 11, 2012| 2 Comments »

This arctic fox looks a lot like a swift fox.

Classifying the various dog species has become a bit contentious in recent years.

Assays of various types of DNA has called into question the validity of many assumed and proposed species.

For example, a study that involved a large sample of nuclear DNA from  coyotes and wolves from many different populations found that the s0-called red wolf (supposed Canis rufus) is actually almost entirely coyote in its make-up.  It does have some wolf ancestry, but this wolf ancestry comes from the Holarctic wolf (Canis lupus), not any supposed endemic North American wolf species.

Now, wolves are fairly charismatic animals. They have quite a following in the popular culture–there is even a “wolfaboo” subculture on the internet– and in many ways, they have come to symbolize the modern conservation movement. People know that dogs are derived from wolves, and most people are willing to accept that dogs are part of the wolf species, even if there is still some institutional and cultural resistance to that notion.

Science knows a lot about wolves, and the popular culture knows a lot about them, too.

However, wolves are not the only wild dogs in which genetic analyses may reveal that species status is a bit more blurred than one might expect.

Let’s take three foxes in the genus Vulpes.

Vulpes is the big fox genus that currently includes almost everything called a fox in the Old World– the exception is the bat-eared fox (Otocyon). The red fox (Vulpes vulpes) is the most widespread of the genus, but there are several lesser known species, like the Tibetan and Blandford’s fox.

Among these less known species are the kit fox (Vulpes macrotis) and the swift fox (Vulpes velox). Both of these foxes are found in Western North America, and there is a huge debate about whether these foxes represent a single species or two distinct species.

This swift fox looks very much like the arctic fox at the top of this post.

Now, at the crux of classifying these species is figuring out how closely related they are to their closest relative, which is, surprisingly, the arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus).  Traditionally, the arctic fox has been placed in its own genus (Alopex), but the great preponderance of the genetic evidence shows that it belongs in the genus Vulpes. 

These foxes all have 54 chromosomes, and the swift and kit foxes regularly interbreed in West Texas and New Mexico, where the two “species” have overlapping ranges. Dragoo and Wayne (2003) examined kit and swift fox morphology and nuclear and mitochondrial DNA, and they found that the bulk of the evidence suggests that kit and swift foxes represent a single species. The authors contend that most of the greater genetic diversity within arid land foxes is actually result of them not dispersing great distances from their natal territories. Over time, populations in certain localities wind up with very distinct genetic characters, which might resemble those of a unique species.  Animals that travel a great distance from their natal territories, like lions and wolves, tend not to have such distinctiveness within a local population. There was always a gene flow across wolf and lion populations that may not exist at the same extent with smaller, less mobile species.

Animals identified as kit and swift foxes regularly interbreed in parts of New Mexico and West Texas. For whatever reason, hybrids have not been confirmed in southern Colorado and Western Kansas, where their ranges also overlap.

Now, the notion that swift and kit foxes are part of the same species is not universally accepted, and this is where the arctic fox comes into play.

Mercure (1993) examined the mitochondrial DNA of kit, swift, and arctic foxes and found that kit and swift foxes different from each other as much as they differ from arctic foxes. At the time, arctic foxes were still listed as belonging to their own genus, and this study was used as evidence to suggest that swift and kit foxes really were unique species. (Wayne was also an author of this study.)

However, now that we know that arctic foxes are actually in the genus Vulpes, we have another issue that needs to be considered.

Yes. I’m aware that mtDNA studies can be quite flawed. They examine only maternal inheritance, and very often, these studies have unusual biases. For example, initial mtDNA studies underestimated the date when forest and savanna elephants, which are now classified as separate species, split from each other.

But it doesn’t mean that these studies are inherently useless. When combined with studies that look at more of the genome than mtDNA, they can provide an interesting picture about the evolution of a species.

And here, I think these two studies are suggesting something quite radical:

Not only are swift and kit foxes the same species, the arctic fox is part of this same species.

Now, going with this classification is very contrary to what is generally accepted.

Arctic foxes are believed to have evolved in Europe 200,000 years ago. That is when they first appear in the fossil record, and the ancestral swift fossils have been dated to 500,000 years ago.  The Mercure study strongly suggests that arctic foxes evolved in North America, even though the earliest fossil remains were found in Europe.

However, it is also possible that the ancestral swift fox fossils are not in the same lineage as modern swift and kit foxes and that they actually evolved from the arctic fox. Traditional accounts of arctic fox evolution trace them to a common ancestor it share with the red fox, Vulpes alopecoides.  

It is possible that arctic, swift, and kit foxes all radiated from that ancestor, or arctic foxes are actually the ancestors of the swift and kit foxes. Perhaps, these foxes of arid and semi-arid lands are nothing more than arctic foxes that have adapted to a very different climate.

Further, there are several relatives of the swift/kit fox and arctic fox in Asia– the corsac and Tibetan fox. They are relatives, but they aren’t as closely related as swift/kit foxes are to arctic foxes. The fact that these three have such a close relationship with each other is really quite interesting.

The truth is we simply don’t know how these three foxes evolved, but it is clear that they are very similar to each other.

In fact, they differ less from each other in terms of their morphology than different breeds of dog or even different subspecies of wolf do. It is very likely that fertile hybrids can be produced with arctic foxes and either swift and kit foxes.  Arctic foxes live well to the north of where both swift and kit foxes are found, so no wild hybrids have been documented.

Thus, it might be more useful to think of them as representing a single species in which some populations have specialized adaptations. Kit foxes living in desert environments have big ears and pale coats, while arctic foxes have pelts that change colors depending upon the season.

More research must be performed on these three foxes, and the possibility that the represent a single species with three specialized subspecies has to be considered.

We know far less about the evolutionary relationships of these three foxes than we do about wolves, but they appear to have the same problem that wolves do.   Wolf taxonomy is always in flux these days, mainly because the studies don’t reflect what has always been assumed.

But it may be that wolves are not the only part of the dog family that might have these sorts of surprises in their DNA.

To me it is obvious that this foxes are different species from wolves, and because arctic foxes produce only infertile hybrids with red foxes, it pretty obvious that they aren’t the same species either. It’s when you start to find a great deal of interfertility between two wild  “species” that are also as distantly related to each other as they both are to a third species that one really should start to reconsider the taxonomy.

Perhaps the most parsimonious action would be to declare a single species for kit, swift, and arctic foxes.

I know that this is an extreme minority positions, but I think this reflects what has been found thus far.

See related posts:

 

 

 

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