Wolf in Whose Clothing?
Genetic detectives target endangered animals
by Peter Jekel HighGrader Magazine Sept./Oct. 2000
In the 1960s, Douglas Pimlott, a famous wolf researcher, posed an important question about the future of the wolf in North America; "Will the wolf survive into the next century?" Since that time attitudes towards the wolf has undergone a major change. People are flocking in ever-increasing numbers to places like Algonquin Provincial Park, Prince Albert and Riding Mountain National Parks, as well as a number of private sanctuaries such as the Haliburton Forest and Wild Life Reserve to listen to the chilling sound of wolf howls.
"Even when wolves fail to respond," says Susan Carr, a park naturalist with Prince Albert National Park, "the people go away with a new found respect for the animal."
In spite of this expanding public support, the wolf still has its enemies. In the United States, the campaign against the wolf has moved to the area of science and genetics - which could have very frightening consequences for a whole array of preservation issues all over the world.
In 1973, the wolf was designated an Endangered Species in the United States, which should have led to its reintroduction into suitable habitats. To carry out its mandate under the authority of the Endangered Species Act, the United States Department of Fish and Wildlife (USDFW) planned a reintroduction into parts of Idaho, Wyoming and Montana - once prime wolf habitats. Today it is prime ranching country.
The reintroduction program was stalled by the Farm Bureaus in all three states and it wasn't until 1991, almost 20 years after the wolf had been declared an endangered species, that the United States Congress ordered the USDFW to conduct an environmental impact statement.
Hoping to influence this process the Farm Bureaus turned to science to try and prove that the wolf was unworthy of protection because the species had become so inbred with coyotes that it no longer existed as a distinct species.
Such a delisting would have prevented the reintroduction of the wolf into the western states. As well, it would have given ranchers in British Columbia and Alberta the rationale to halt the westward expansion that has been taking place in Canada since the mid 1980s.
The Farm Bureaus argument was overturned. But the use of genetics to target endangered species seems to be on the rise.
The Florida Panther has come under the scrutiny of the genetic detectives who are attempting to strip it of its endangered status. A similar situation is facing the wood bison/plain bison crosses in Wood Buffalo National Park. They are seen as a threat to the pure wood bison of the nearby Mackenzie bison sanctuary. The Red Wolf of North Carolina is also being targetted because it has apparently inbred with coyotes and thus could be made unworthy of endangered species status.

Coyote Ugly
Is there any basis for the Farm Bureau's contention that the gray wolf lacks genetic purity?
George Kolenosky of Ontario's Ministry of Natural Resources has studied both wolves and coyotes.
"The wolves out west - the ones being used for the United States reintroduction program - show no evidence of hybridization," he says. In Eastern Canada, however, there is more evidence of hybridization.
In Ontario there are as many as 6000 large coyote-like animals often referred to as coydogs - which refers to the cross between coyote and dogs. But the word is something of a misnomer because coyotes do not tend to mate with dogs. The animals are probably the result of wolf-coyote interbreeding.
In the 1960s, Ontario's Ministry of Lands and Forests conducted hybridization experiments on captive wolves and coyotes. The result looked very much like the coydogs in the wild. They had the coyote's narrow face and pointed ears. Their colouring was a tawny brown with a sprinkling of black along the back, typical of coyotes. But they had the large feet and large broad skulls of a wolf.
Audrey Tournay runs the Aspen Wildlife Sanctuary near Rosseau, Ontario and has raised a number of orphaned coyote pups. She describes them as "untamable even when they have been bottle-fed from birth which is very unlike wolves, which develop attachments to humans."
The coyote-wolf crosses born in captivity maintained the coyote's wildness.
The one problem with the coyote-wolf experiment was that it was done on a captive population in artificial conditions. In the real wild, wolves and coyotes are very disdainful of one another - with the coyotes usually coming out the loser.
Isle Royale in Lake Superior once had a healthy population of coyotes but they disappeared shortly after wolf were reintroduced in the 1940s. In Manitoba's Riding Mountain National Park, coyotes are often killed by the resident wolf packs. Algonquin Provincial Park has wolves but not coyotes.
So with this apparent animosity, how is it possible for the coydog to be a wolf-coyote crossbreed?
Wolf packs are very territorial and their territories are largely fluid. Wolf packs will maintain a minimum distance from each other, often known as a buffer zone. Deer and other animals can live in these buffer zones in relative peace. In effect, the buffer zone acts as a food reserve for the packs.
The buffer zone is also the territory for lone wolves which have no pack affiliation and would probably be killed if they trespassed onto pack territory. Coyotes also frequent the buffer zones, feeding on the carrion left behind by the hunting packs. It is not inconceivable to imagine a lone wolf and coyote coming into contact in the buffer zone without the coyote necessarily ending up dead.
It is likely that inter-breeding has occurred, but the propagation of the coydogs is now coming from breeding with each other. Many researchers now consider them as a separate coyote subspecies.

In the Blood
If a wolf looks like a wolf, can it have coyote ancestry? The answer is a complex "yes" and is based on a landmark study that looked at the genetic makeup of different North American wolf populations. The Farm Bureaus relied on this study as evidence of wolf impurity. Ironically, this same study was used by the United States Department of Fisheries and Wildlife to reject the lobbying efforts.
The study looked at mitochondrial DNA. Mitochondria are tiny parts of cells which produce the energy needed by the cell and DNA is the genetic blueprint. The DNA that tells whether we have blue eyes or brown hair, or whether one is a dog, human, wolf or coyote, is called nuclear DNA. Nuclear DNA is the combination of DNA from both parents.
On the other hand, mitochondrial DNA is an exact replica of the mother's mitochondrial DNA. Therefore, maternal parentage will never be lost. Mitochondrial DNA is, in other words, an excellent tool for determining the extent of genetic interaction between species and subspecies.
The study, conducted in 1991, concluded that some wolves in the past had interbred with coyotes, but it went further to explain that interbreeding was not taking place on an ongoing basis. In fact, the coyote-like traits of the hybrid eastern wolf populations are slowly being "bred out."
The more recent the hybridization, the more coyote-like the wolves appear. In Minnesota and Michigan, wolves are essentially wolf-like in appearance, but according to the study, 52% had a coyote ancestor. Here the hybridization occurred approximately 100 years ago.
Wolves in southeastern Ontario, the Tweed Wolf, on the other hand, still show coyote-like traits, especially their smaller size. Hybridization with coyotes occurred later, with coyotes not appearing in the region until 1919. Thus, it will take some time for the coyote traits to be bred out. From there the coyote moved into southern Quebec by 1945 and to New Brunswick and Maine in 1970.
But what about the grey wolf in the northwestern United States?
Dr. Ron Nowak of the USDFW explains: "The grey wolves now re-establishing themselves in the northwestern United States (the are of concern for the Farm Bureaus) show no hint of genetic influence from the coyote. Indeed, specimens from this population are the largest wolves ever collected in the United States.

Human Impact
Why did coyote-wolf hybrids occur in the first place? Kolenosky suggests that wolf-coyote crosses may be related to human activity. As more forested areas are converted into farms, the opportunistic coyote invades and increases the chance of coyote-wolf encounters. In areas where conversion to agriculture has been slow or nonexistent - Alaska or Riding Mountain National Park, wolves do not show any coyote traces in their genetic make up.
Naturalist R.D. Lawrence says the links with humans is even more direct. "When wolves are shot, trapped and poisoned, the pack breaks up. This creates a few surviving lone wolves. When mating season arrives and these isolated wolves have no mate, they will breed with coyotes which thrive on the presence of humans."
Is interbreeding something we can or should do much about? The World Wildlife Fund suggest creating Carnivore Conservation Areas which would set aside large tracts of wilderness for larger predators such as wolves. If these areas were set up, interbreeding with coyotes would be a much remoter possibility.
But we must also accept the fact that animals are still evolving. The coyote-wolf hybridization has been affected by man-made changes in the animal environment. Does this mean that hybrid animals are less worth saving than pure animals? The answer should be no. Animal evolution isn't stagnant and the natural world thrives because it changes and adapts.

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