Scientists Find Red Wolf DNA in a Unique Group of Wild Dogs in Texas | Hacker News Reader

Scientists Find Red Wolf DNA in a Unique Group of Wild Dogs in Texas

gizmodo.com

43 pointscurtis8 comments

In the book Coyote America [1] the author goes into detail about these Red Wolves. One of the problems with raising pristine Red Wolves in the wild is their penchant for mating with Coyotes. The author went on to lament the Red Wolf breeding program for culling these Red Wolf - Coyote hybrids. The author's point on the matter is that it is natural for similar species to exchange genes in order to make new species that are better suited. If what is naturally surviving in the wild are these hybrids, well then maybe we should just let the hybrids alone and accept that the Red Wolf lineage cannot survive as is in America today. Furthermore, the author even questions whether or not the Red Wolf is even its own unique species, since it could be the case that the Red Wolf is also a hybrid.

What we can tell is that there is a lot of mixing going on in the American canines. There probably always has been and to artificially try to stop it and preserve the snapshot of species that we saw when we got here is fool-hearted and against how nature works.

[1]: https://www.amazon.com/Coyote-America-Natural-Supernatural-H...

Fully agree with you. It is the ultimate hubris to meddle with nature thinking we know best. And just foolish when we look at our track record doing that to date.

There are other good reasons to meddle, but this is not one of them.

The red wolf population now has fewer than 40 surviving members, leaving them once again on the brink of extinction in the wild.

Maybe this discovery will lead to something positive for the their species.

>Maybe this discovery will lead to something positive for the their species.

They aren't a species. Wolves (red and grey), dogs, and coyotes are all technically the same species, since they can freely interbreed and produce fertile offspring (unlike horse-donkey offspring, mules, which are sterile).

Some mules (a very few - something like 60 in the past 500 years) are actually fertile. Does that change your mind about whether or not horses and donkeys are distinct species?

The reality is that there is no good definition of species, and cannot be. Yours is a common one, but has a lot of problems - declaring wolves and pomeranians the same species is a tough bridge to cross for most people: you've made the definition so broad it means little. Biology is messy and in the real world there are no clear-cut, convenient dividing lines.

Another problem with that definition is that there is no transitivity in real biology. Animal A and Animal B may be able to produce fertile offspring. Animal B and Animal C may be able to produce fertile offspring. But Animal A and Animal D [a sibling of Animal C, thanks KMag for that point!] may not be able to.

Of course, we also would find it strange to declare that two humans incapable of producing fertile (or any) offspring different species.

You may want to introduce a fourth individual in your example, so it's not limited to species (mostly amphibians and fish) that are able to morph sex or hermaphroditic species (some molluscs, snails, etc.). Otherwise, the example is trivially true for all mammalian species that I'm aware of; for humans, if Arthur and Betty can easily breed fertile offspring, and Betty and Clive can easily breed fertile offspring... then Arthur and Clive are going to have a very low breeding success rate without technological assistance.

something similar occurred with siberian wild horses of precolumbian america, which were apparently hunted to extinction by natives but survive in traces of present day wild populations:

https://westhunt.wordpress.com/2018/08/28/neanderhorse/

Sounds like a pack of coywolves in the making.

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