okay the taxonomy of the genus Canis is completely fucked
iNaturalist recognizes gray wolf, "eastern wolf" and red wolf as three different species, though from wikipedia it seems like all three have hybridized like crazy with each other and with coyotes and domestic dogs for their whole evolutionary history, and they all split apart very recently.
Also African wolves are hybrids of gray wolves and Ethiopian wolves, but Himalayan and Indian wolves are more closely related to African wolves, and golden jackals are nested within the same genus.
But the African wolf is more closely related to gray wolves and coyotes than it is to golden jackals. (????)
I don't know. I'm not sure if any of that is even correct. There are a gazillion genetic studies trying to figure out how all of these species are related and how they hybridized with each other, and it's all over the place.
ANYWAY the reason this is so weird is that in the USA we have coyotes, which are abundant, viewed as vermin, and can be hunted year round without limits, and wolves, which are extremely protected and endangered and vital to ecosystems. A lot of people LOVE wolves, but they have much more negative or indifferent feelings toward coyotes.
Here, coyotes are thought of as so strongly and sharply different from wolves, TOTALLY different things. The main distinction being size; wolves are huge and gigantic and coyotes are small.
But now I'm learning that many of the animals called "wolves" in other parts of the world are much more similar to our coyotes, both in size and social behaviors. And furthermore, it seems like size and social behaviors convergently evolved in different species or populations of wolves, rather than the "small, more socially flexible" wolves and the "big, tight-knit social structure" wolves forming two separate branches of the family tree
So like, it's undeniable, whether you go by genetics or by appearances or by behavior, that coyotes are just a type of wolf, they're one of the several wolf species that exist.
And then you get to the fact that basically all of the coyotes in the Eastern USA are actually verified to be hybrids between coyotes and gray wolves, and that the endangered red wolves, which used to inhabit the area where these new coyotes live, were threatened by hybridization with coyotes, and that the extant red wolves were selected out of a pool of red wolf-coyote hybrids. But actually, red wolves were thought to be themselves hybrids of gray wolves and coyotes, but actually actually, the species have been all hybridizing for their whole evolutionary history, so what does that even mean?
The red wolf reintroduction program has been struggling because people keep shooting and killing the animals. They wear bright orange collars, but people shoot them anyway. The enemies of red wolf conservation say they are not genuine wolves and are "just coyotes."
The wolves don't know what a species is, but the law is called the Endangered SPECIES act, so red wolves have to be a "species," or it is legal to slaughter them all. Species is fake, but we need it to be real to justify the value of certain populations of animals.
I don't know, like. I'm not an expert on this stuff! I'm just having a lot of thoughts on...the strong cultural distinction between coyotes and wolves? Like the cultural difference is SO much stronger than the biological difference. Wolf conservation is forced to prove that wolves are Totally Different than coyotes, and to decide that mixes between coyotes and wolves are automatically coyotes.
And I'm always seeing this common idea that reintroducing wolves will totally transform the ecosystem and fix what's wrong with it, because wolves fulfill the role of large predators. But if there's coyote-wolf hybrids already here, what are they doing to the ecosystem? And if they're behaving in the ecosystem more like omnivorous scavengers than large predators, is that because of what they are genetically, or is it because of the environment they have to survive in?
Yellowstone wolves were so impactful because of how they interacted with large herbivores, but if you introduced wolves into much of the eastern USA, where elk and bison have been wiped out, what would that even do? Would the wolves be able to thrive at all? Would they stay wolves, or would they breed with coyotes and make coyote-wolves again? Coyotes have thrived in the ecosystem humans have built over the past 100 years, becoming ever more successful and numerous. How could wolf genes take the place of coyote genes in an ecosystem that is so coyotegenic?
What about areas where the elk have been reintroduced? Do the coyote-wolves stay coyote-like, or do they start to wolf-ify because of different genes being selected?
Why's everybody swear up and down that somebody they know owns a wolfdog, but nobody ever has a coyotedog, even though contact between coyotes and dogs seems way more likely?
So many questions that gnaw at the very foundations of what we know about wilderness.
turnnoffyourmind
annaxmalina
areudirty
romaincrisis
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