Coywolves. (c) Jon G. Way
Is it a wolf? No.
A coyote? No.
A mixture of the two? Oh, yes.
Northeastern wild canids have been leading biologists on a wild goose chase recently, as science scrambles to catch up with just what, exactly, Mother Nature has been cooking up in Massachusetts. Reports of extra large eastern coyotes have been rolling in for decades, but a certain subset of these animals has really caught people’s attention. Dubbed “coywolves,” they appear to be a cross between wolves and coyotes. Not only do they fall in between in size, but they have retained the urban-tolerance of coyotes while adding in the social pack behavior of wolves. And yes, they have added white-tailed deer to their dinner menus, something that most coyotes are not large or strong enough to take down.
A recent paper in the Northeastern Naturalist set out to sort out the “canis soup” that’s been stewing in the northeast by using mitochondrial DNA analyses to figure out what genes coywolves carry, and how closely they are related to other known canids. {1}
Now, where this gets really confusing is how the authors define a wolf. For the most part, we tend to think of just two species of wolves in North America: red wolves of the East, Canis rufus (and only in North Carolina now), and gray wolves of the West, Canis lupus. But, there is a point of contention over “eastern wolves.” Until recently, this wolf of southeastern Quebec was classified as a sub-species of gray wolf, termed Canis lupus lycaon. But recent DNA evidence points toward it actually not being a gray wolf at all… in fact, it falls out most closely related to Canis rufus. This may seem an esoteric point, but it is hugely important, so hold on to this thought. As such, several biologists have called for reclassifying both the red wolf and the eastern wolf as Canis lycaon. The jury is still out on this, as there are a lot of politics to consider with such a move, but just hold on to the fact that eastern wolves are not gray wolves, and are evolutionarily in a different species group. (more…)
