"New" Wolf

Walter Hingley sent me a story by Philip Lee from the Ottawa Citizen (no link) with fascinating implications: it seems that the big, deer- eating canid of eastern Canada and New England is not a hybrid, as has been routinely claimed, but a third species of "wolf", counting the coyote (or fourth-- it may or may not be conspecific with the red wolf of the south). And as I have been arguing for years, it is the wolf of the early colonists, reclaiming its ground from Canada as the forests came back.

"For decades, biologists had been arguing that the wolves in Algonquin Park were hybrids, a combination of grey wolves and western coyotes. That theory has now been blown apart by new research that shows they are a separate species.

"After four years of pioneering scientific investigation, a team of Canadian
wildlife geneticists has rewritten the history of wolves in North America.

" "It is an eastern wolf," Mr. White says. "If it was a sub-species of grey
wolf, it should have grey wolf in it. It doesn't have grey wolf in it. That
lends support that the whole of the East Coast of North America had this
wolf and it was not a grey wolf. It was one big population." Mr. White says
researchers believe the red wolf is simply the southern remnant of this
wolf.

" "Our data supports the fact that it is a real species and that this species
was in fact the dominant wolf from east of the Mississippi, the Gulf Coast
north up to the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence. That was the eastern timber
wolf that the original colonial people would have seen."

"The story of the eastern wolf begins one to two million years ago when there
was a common wolf ancestor in North America. Some of these wolves travelled
to Europe and Asia over the land bridge where they evolved independently
into the grey wolf. The wolves that remained in North America evolved into
the smaller eastern North America wolf. About 300,000 years ago, an offshoot
of this wolf evolved into the western coyote.

"Also about 300,000 years ago, the grey wolf returned to North America over
the ice bridge.

"When European settlers arrived in North America, they began clearing land,
farming and killing wolves. The wolves that survived migrated north into
Canada, a more pristine environment away from the slaughter."

(Snip)

"In North Carolina, the red wolf reintroduction managers are using the
Canadian laboratories to try to protect a pure genetic strain of wolf. The
wolves they have reintroduced to the wild are breeding with coyotes.
Biologists are removing hybrids and coyotes to protect the genetic purity of
their endangered wolves. Mr. White thinks such a program is a mistake and
ultimately may be doomed.

" "We're acting as God," he says. "I don't think there's such a thing as pure.
It's very hard to know what's pure and whether it has any meaning. I take a
much more functional view of the world.

" "We need top-end predators in these various ecosystems and we need them to
be suitable."

"He uses the evolution of the eastern wolves in Algonquin Park to make his
point. There, wolves have been evolving according to changes in the
ecosystem. The wolves on the southeast edge of the park have been breeding
with coyotes. Wolves in the north have been breeding with grey wolves.

" "Whether in between that is a more pure one, whatever that may mean, is
anybody's guess," Mr. White says. "We can, from the genetics, show that
there is really one large population that expands from Manitoba, Minnesota,
Wisconsin, Michigan, through Ontario and Quebec. That population is
exchanging genes among themselves. There is an evolution going on.

" "I view this as a wonderful kind of reflection of Canadian biodiversity, in
that we've got three species that have put their genes into the mix. We've
got a landscape that's been heavily impacted by humans and we're watching
how this might unfold." "

Amen.

Says Matt: "How desperate we all are to pin down every thing as fact, just to have a little imagined control over it. The Big Corrections come around every once in a while and remind us how much "in charge" we really are, butwe soon forget them. Maybe that's our special talent."

"Big Corrections"-- I love it.