The new work, published Wednesday in Science Advances, finds that the gray wolf is the one true wolf in the United States.
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Studies have shown that the so-called scientific alibi given by the US Fish and Wildlife Service regarding the ousting of the gray wolf from protection status is not so scientific.
In fact, eastern wolves had 25 percent coyote DNA and 75 percent gray wolf DNA, while red wolves contained 75 percent coyote DNA and 25 percent gray wolf DNA.
“The recently defined eastern wolf is just a gray wolf and coyote mix, with about 75 percent of its genome assigned to the gray wolf”, senior author and professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, Robert Wayne reportedly said. But as wolves bounce back in areas like Yellowstone National Park, the Great Lakes, and the South, debates have been brewing about the possibility of removing the gray wolf from protection under the Endangered Species Act, which would make it legal to hunt them again. They gained protected status under the Endangered Species Act in 1973, but the US Fish and Wildlife Service’s recognition of the eastern wolf as a separate species in 2013 prompted reconsideration of this status.
Over 15 years ago, a research team at Canada claimed that the eastern wolf is different, and should not be considered as subspecies of the gray wolf.
Protecting hybrids of endangered and non-endangered species is a notoriously murky area under the ESA, so the taxonomical classification of North American wolves has real world consequences for their conservation. It stated that the eastern wolf and not the gray wolf occupied much of the Great Lakes region and the Eastern states.
The presence of the eastern wolf in the eastern USA would also mean that the gray wolf’s original listing could be annulled, they say.
Red wolves turn out to be about 25 percent gray wolf and 75 percent coyote, while the eastern wolf’s ancestry is approximately 75 percent gray wolf and 25 percent coyote, Wayne said.
Therefore, the eastern wolf is just a hybrid of the gray wolf and the coyote.
“There is no evidence for distinct eastern or red wolf species”, he said. The fact that this wolf’s supposed historic range overlaps with the gray wolf’s range has been used by the USFWS as grounds for delisting the gray wolf.
“What’s very exciting about this paper is that it’s using extremely powerful tools to address longstanding, challenging questions in conservation”, Ryan Kovach, a research wildlife biologist at the United States Geological Survey who was not involved in the new study, told The New York Times. The same process occurred more recently in the Great Lakes area, as wolves became rare and coyotes entered the region in the 1920s.
“If you did this same experiment with humans – human genomes from Eurasia – you would find that one to four percent of the human genome has what looks like odd genomic elements from another species: Neanderthals”, Wayne said. Since then, gray wolves have rebounded due to protections, reintroduction and natural repopulation, making wolf recovery in the West one of the most successful efforts under the ESA.
A red wolf (left) compared to a coyote (right). The last red wolves were removed from the wild in 1980, and captive-bred animals were released into the wild beginning in 1987. Inter-breeding in the wild is common and may even be beneficial, he said.
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“It is written into the Endangered Species Act that if a taxonomic mistake is uncovered you can revoke the protection”, Wayne said.
