Such evolutionary changes usually reflect genetic variation and natural selection, which leave a new type of organism better suited for its environment than its ancestors. Members of this family are known as canines.Įndangered An adjective used to describe species at risk of going extinct.Įurasia That part of the globe covered by Europe and Asia.Įvolutionary An adjective that refers to changes that occur within a species over time as it adapts to its environment. The family includes dogs, wolves, foxes, jackals and coyotes. The scientists who study them are known as biologists.Ĭanid The biological family of mammals that are carnivores and omnivores. He says looking at DNA from ancient North American canines - before wolves and coyotes ever mated with each other - could help clear things up.īiology The study of living things. According to his own research, the eastern wolf still deserves to be its own species. But he doesn’t think it’s the final word. He’s a biologist at Trent University in Ontario, Canada. This study is an important step, says Paul Wilson. Such laws, however, would be nearly impossible to enforce, she adds. That would keep someone from accidentally killing a wolf that looks like a coyote. The only way to make sure wolf genes stick around in certain areas would be to ban the killing of both wolves and coyotes in those places, vonHoldt says. So animals with mixed-up ancestry “don’t always look very different from a pure coyote or pure wolf.” “These animals don’t walk around with little name tags on them in the field,” says vonHoldt. How can we protect a group of animals that’s not its own species, but carries valuable genetic information? So the blended genetics of these canines adds a new twist to an ongoing battle over wolf protection in the United States. “They’re just so capable of moving around.” “Nothing isolates a wolf,” though, says Smith. Usually, when animals are defined as separate species, it means they have boundaries that keep them from mating with each other. It’s a similar story for the eastern wolf.īlended species like these are hard to label, Smith admits. “The wolf part of their genome might actually represent the last of the southeastern gray wolf,” she says. Still, vonHoldt adds, red wolves are important to protect. She also worked with Wayne on the new study. She’s a biologist at Princeton University in New Jersey. But “we don’t find anything incredibly unique in the red wolf that you can’t find in other canines,” says Bridgett vonHoldt. Red wolves and eastern wolves look slightly different from gray wolves because of their coyote genes. Genetic mixing between different kinds of wolves makes it even harder to create laws to protect them. Elsewhere, it’s legal for hunters to kill gray wolves. But gray wolves are only listed as endangered in some places. Red wolves are listed across the whole nation as endangered with extinction. Wolves in the United States are protected by different laws depending on where they live. What difference does all this make? Potentially quite a lot. Mixing their genes with coyotes probably helped wolves survive when times were tough. There they likely bred with struggling wolves. Killing off some gray wolves made room for coyotes to move east. He’s a biologist who leads the Wolf Restoration Program in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming. Red wolves and eastern wolves probably first appeared when early settlers hunted gray wolves in the eastern United States, says Doug Smith. He’s a biologist at the University of California, Los Angeles. That suggests these three wolf groups are more evolutionarily related than scientists had thought, says Robert Wayne. And eastern wolves and red wolves are just as closely related to gray wolves as they are to other members of their species. The new data mean that both red and eastern wolves have mated with coyotes in the past. The international team of scientists reported its finding online July 27 in Science Advances. Eastern wolves have about 25 to 50 percent coyote ancestry. Red wolves have about 75 percent coyote genes and just 25 percent wolf genes, they found. That let them figure out how much of each animal’s genetic material came from wolves or coyotes. The researchers compared the genomes in these individuals to those from pure coyotes and Eurasian wolves. The new study looked at the entire genetic makeup, or genome, of 23 wild canines from around North America. That’s a region where gray wolves no longer exist. Red wolves call the southeastern United States home. Eastern wolves live in the Great Lakes region, where gray wolves are now scarcer. Red wolves and eastern wolves look similar to gray wolves but are often treated as different species.
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