Red Wolves Went Extinct in 1980, but Their Ghost May Live on in the Coyotes of This Texas Island
Red wolves were declared extinct in the wild in 1980, according to a study in Science Advances, but the people of Galveston Island, Texas, still heard them howling in the night. Then they noticed something strange about the island’s coyotes. The solution to that mystery might provide a way to save the critically endangered red wolf.
Ron Wooten was the first to notice that the local coyotes don’t look like typical coyotes. Their legs and noses are too long, and their fur is distinctly reddish. A former biologist, Wooten is a resident of Galveston Island. With the help of other locals, he had been tracking sightings of these unusual animals for several years when he chanced upon a couple of dead coyotes on the side of the road.
He took tissue samples from the carcasses and sent them to Bridgett vonHoldt, who studies evolutionary and population genomics at Princeton University. vonHoldt and her team analyzed the DNA and discovered that Wooten was right. These aren’t ordinary coyotes.
About 30 percent of their genetic material came from extinct red wolves, known as ghost alleles. vonHoldt and colleagues, including Wooten, published their results in 2018 in the journal Genes.
Read More: Why a Daring Coyote May Have Swum Two Miles to Reach Alcatraz Island
How Red Wolves Became Ghost Wolves
Red wolf
(Image Courtesy of Tristan Spinski)
The only recognized red wolves surviving today are the results of a captive breeding program that reintroduced a small group of red wolves in North Carolina. That population is dwindling for the usual reasons: habitat loss, poaching, disease, and accidental shootings when they’re mistaken for coyotes.
Though the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is working to rebuild the population, these animals face other problems as well. All of these captive-bred wolves are descended from fewer than 14 individuals, and some of those may be related, Kristin Brzeski, a wildlife biologist who studies conservation genetics at Michigan Tech, and one of the authors of the 2018 paper announcing the findings, told Discover. Brzeski was a post-doc in vonHoldt’s lab at the time of the discovery.
This means there is very little genetic variation in these animals. Genetic variation is needed for the population to be resilient enough to adapt to changing environments and changing threats.
Understand Ghost Wolf Genetics
Yet ghost wolves, these coyotes that have red wolf genes, carry genetic variation that was previously thought to be extinct. This may aid in what Brzeski calls “genetic rescue” for the endangered red wolf. Potential approaches include crossbreeding, cloning, and perhaps introducing the ghost alleles into red wolves using gene-editing technology.
The idea is to produce animals with an even greater proportion of red wolf ancestry. Could we eventually get to the point where the animal becomes a red wolf?
“If you’re just looking at percentages in the genome, we could get to that point,” Brzeski said. “But percentages of a genome is not a whole species. Still, it could be a way to increase genetic diversity in the very endangered, very inbred red wolf.”
Saving Red Wolves Is a Community Effort
This encouraging story offers another lesson. None of this would have happened without citizen scientists and the local community working closely with experts.
“We really value the local citizen perspective,” Brzeski told Discover, pointing out that, particularly in Galveston, these efforts are community-led.
And the experts are not just listening to the like-minded.
“We one hundred percent welcome alternative viewpoints,” Brzeski said. “That’s also part of the conversation.”
She pointed out that you can’t have a successful conservation program, particularly of a carnivore, without some level of community acceptance.
“That doesn’t mean everyone wants the same thing, but at least there’s trust and transparency, and hopefully respect,” she added.
Meanwhile, Brzeski, along with vonHoldt, has founded the Gulf Coast Canine Project.
“We created GCCP to encompass our research and the community-based approach we are developing to understand, monitor, and manage the unique canines persisting across the Gulf Coast,” they wrote on the project’s website.
Read More: Dire Wolf De-Extinction Breeds Both Hope and Uncertainty
Article Sources
Our writers at Discovermagazine.com use peer-reviewed studies and high-quality sources for our articles, and our editors review for scientific accuracy and editorial standards. Review the sources used below for this article:
