Paula Wild | Paula Wild

February 24, 2019February 24, 2019

Red wolf DNA found in Texas canids

Red wolves were declared extinct in the wild by 1980. Formerly ranging throughout south central and eastern portions of the US, hunting, trapping and loss of habitat decimated their numbers.

Luckily, the US Fish and Wildlife Service captured about forty of the wolves and began a captive breeding program. Red wolf families and individuals were released and captive-born pups were successfully cross-fostered in wilderness areas of North Carolina from the late 1980s on.

According to Regina Mossotti, director of animal care and conservation at the Endangered Wolf Center in Missouri, in early 2018 there were approximately 230 red wolves in captive breeding programs but populations in the wild had dropped from over 100 to around thirty.

Coyotes are found in many urban and rural areas of North America. Photo courtesy US National Park Service

But a few years ago, biologist Ron Wooten noticed something odd about the coyotes he was photographing on Galveston Island in Texas. When he found two of the animals dead on the roadside, he took some samples hoping genetic testing would provide some answers.

Researchers at Princeton University were shocked to find a piece of endangered red wolf genome in the tissue they analysed. The genetic evidence indicates that at least some of the Galveston Island ‘coyotes’ appear to be red wolf/coyote hybrids.

Red wolves (and eastern wolves, which primarily inhabited southeastern Canada and the northeastern US and are now only found in southern Ontario and Quebec) will interbreed with coyotes when their populations fall below a sustainable level.

Still, researchers were surprised to find red wolf DNA on an island in Texas. And the Galveston Island canids are unique in that they possess some red wolf genes not found in the captive population.

Challenges to reintroducing red wolves to wilderness areas continue and they may once again be declared extinct in the wild.

The Endangered Species Act does not include protected status for hybrids but some scientists feel this thinking is outdated, especially since hybridisation does not seem to be as rare as previously thought.

But even if the Galveston Island canids do not receive protected status, their presence is a testament to the resiliency of wolves and opens the door to further discussions on the status of hybrids.

Top image: Red wolves are lean animals with a distinct reddish cast to their coats. They’re in between the size of a grey wolf and coyote. Photo courtesy B. Bartel, USFWS

January 26, 2019February 18, 2019

What wolves eat

As carnivores, wolves will eat anything from a mouse to a moose including grasshoppers, birds and frogs. Although wild wolves will occasionally eat berries, their bodies require meat to survive.

As Jack London wrote in White Fang, a story about a wolf-dog hybrid, “The aim of life was meat. Life itself was meat.”

Most wolves obtain their meat from ungulates such as deer, elk, moose, bison and muskoxen. While it’s dangerous hunting large animals with horns and hooves, the huge food reward is worth the effort and risk of injury or even death. On the other hand, it takes a lot of mice to fill a wolf’s belly and the energy expended is often greater than the calories gained.

While most wolves depend on ungulates for their sustenance, some eat a lot of fish. This has been recorded throughout the world and often involves fish travelling upstream to spawn.

This wolf caught 15 sockeye salmon in one hour in Brooks River, Alaska. Photo courtesy Paul Stinsa

But some wolves rely heavily on fish and marine-related animals year-round. In fact, wolves on some British Columbia coastal islands primarily eat salmon, seals and shellfish, as well as mink and Canada goose eggs. They will even move rocks at low tide to eat tiny molluscs called chitons. Wolves on outer islands may seldom – if ever – see a deer.

Wolves aren’t picky about their food. They may cache some meat and dig it up for dinner later, as well as scavenge prey that has died of natural causes or been killed by other animals.

They can easily become used to the easy pickings found at unsecured human garbage dumps and will raid campsites or break into tents and kayak holds to check out human food. Although they probably won’t eat much of the food they find this way, they will bite into whatever they can access to check it out.

At times, wolves also kill and eat livestock and pets, which is the major source of their conflict with humans.

Top photo was taken on Ellesmere Island in the high arctic where wolves prey on hares and muskoxen. Photo courtesy Dave Mech

December 14, 2018December 14, 2018

Wolf scat and butterflies

Wolves have cast-iron digestive systems capable of handling fragments of bone and shell, animal fur and even the intact nails from a seal.

These intact seal nails were found in the dried up scat of a BC coastal wolf. Photo by Paula Wild

When it comes to food, wolves are opportunistic. They’ll eat berries and have been known to nibble on human food and garbage. String and remnants of clothes have also been found in the scat of camp robbers.

Wolf scat looks similar to a piece of cord and usually tapers to a point on the end. An adult wolf’s scat is usually between 25 to 38 millimetres (one to 1.5 inches) in diameter. If it’s runny, the wolf may have recently eaten some bloody meat.

Una Ledrew and Dave Ratcliffe were startled when they observed chunks of rope in wolf scat near their home. “They were chewing on and swallowing ropes of all kinds, plastic rope, big thick rope we use to tie up the skiff,” Ledrew said.

Like the seal nails above, big chunks of rope seemed to pass through a wolf’s digestive tract nearly intact. Photo by Una Ledrew

My guess is the wolves were after the salt left behind by human hands but some of the rope had been out in the open for ages. Wolf experts I spoke to were baffled as to why wolves would consume rope.

Wolf scat is more than just part of a wolf’s elimination process; it’s also an important part of lupine communication. Scat is one way wolves’ mark their territory and is often found in conspicuous locations such as trail intersections.

These visual and olfactory markers serve as a signal to warn other wolf packs out of their territory or to let family members know they’ve passed that way. Wolf scat is also part of nature’s recycling program, enriching the soil wherever it’s deposited.

But the biggest surprise about wolf scat is butterflies. They aren’t in it, they’re on it. Apparently, butterflies love wolf scat due to the high concentration of nutrients. In fact, numerous researchers told me, “If you’re looking for wolves, look for butterflies.”

Gerard Gorman (www.probirder.com) is an author and birding and wildlife consultant and guide specialising in central and Eastern Europe. He took this photo in Aggtelek National Park in Hungary.

December 1, 2018December 1, 2018

How keen is a wolf’s sense of smell?

Imagine simply inhaling and being able to tell who has passed by and how long ago, what sex they are and what their general health is, where they’ve been, what they’ve eaten and what mood they’re in.

To a large degree, a wolf navigates the world through its sense of smell. The tip of its nose is a complex landscape of minute ridges and creases, which, when combined with the outer edges of nostrils, creates a pattern as distinct as a human fingerprint.

Each nostril can be moved independently, allowing wolves to determine which direction a particular scent is coming from. Inside the broad snout are approximately 280 million scent receptors, a princely amount when compared to a German shepherd’s 225 million, a dachshund’s 125 million and humans’ scant five to six million.

A wolf’s nose alerts them to danger, the presence of pack members or enemies, female wolves in heat and prey. Each wolf has distinctive scent glands on different parts of their body so smells unique, at least to other canids.

Scientists know that wolves can smell prey 2.5 kilometres (1.5 miles) away. Gordon Haber, who spent most of his life researching wolves in Alaska, was convinced that wolves could smell a dead moose or caribou buried under three metres (ten feet) of snow, even if the wind was blowing the wrong direction.

In Wolves on the Hunt, a radio-collared female wolf with pups makes a beeline for a caribou herd more than 100 kilometres (62 miles) distant.

What surprised the researchers was the timing of the wolf’s journey and the relatively straight line she made for the caribou. The week before her trek, the average daily distance between her den and the caribou was 242 kilometres (150 miles). The day she left, it had narrowed by more than half.

If the wolf had veered to the northwest, she might have missed the herd entirely or not found them until later. There’s no way to know if she smelled the ungulates from her den, picked up their scent partway through her journey or simply headed in the direction she’d found caribou before.

But caribou are highly mobile so the wolf couldn’t have depended on memory alone. The researchers speculate that if a human can smell smoke from a forest fire more than 100 kilometres (62 miles) away, why couldn’t a wolf smell a caribou herd from the same distance?

Photo courtesy Wolf Conservation Centre.

WCC is an environmental education organization that teaches people about wolves, their relationship to the environment and humans’ role in protecting their future.