“We have a huge inventory of coyote and wolf samples in the lab, and it’s quite rare that I would remember any one sample arriving, but no one had ever sent us a scalpel before, so it was a pretty memorable experience trying to extract this DNA.” “Somewhere along the way, the second sample had gotten lost and he ended up sending us the dirty scalpel he had used to take the sample,” said Heppenheimer. They looked particularly interesting and I felt it was worth a second look.” “His enthusiasm and dedication struck me, along with some very intriguing photographs of the canines. “I regularly receive this kind of inquiry, but something about Wooten’s email stood out,” said vonHoldt. He emailed vonHoldt’s lab asking for genetic testing of two road-killed animals. This study traces its origins to wildlife biologist Ron Wooten, who had been observing a population of canines on Galveston Island. Though initially successful ecologically, the red wolf population now has fewer than 40 surviving members, leaving them once again on the brink of extinction in the wild. lupus) in the Yellowstone National Park region and the ongoing restoration efforts for the Mexican wolves ( C. The success of the red wolf recovery program led to other wolf re-introductions, including gray wolves ( C. Of those, 14 successfully reproduced, and by 1990, a population of red wolves had been successfully reintroduced to North Carolina. They had already begun interbreeding with coyotes, so of the 240 canines captured, only 17 were deemed 100 percent wolf. To save the species, the last known red wolves were trapped for a captive breeding program. The small wolves - larger than coyotes but smaller than the better-known gray wolves - once lived throughout the southeastern United States, but by the 1970s, they were facing extinction. Prior to this, the only known living red wolves ( Canis rufus) were a reintroduced group in North Carolina. Now, we have shown that at least one example of a ‘red wolf sighting’ has some validity to it, as these Galveston Island animals definitely carry genes that are present in the captive red wolf population yet absent from coyotes and gray wolf populations.” Their work appears in the special issue “ Conservation Genetics and Genomics” of the journal Genes. “While there have been reports of ‘red wolves’ along the Gulf Coast, conventional science dismissed them as misidentified coyotes. “This is a remarkable finding, as red wolves were declared extinct in this region over 35 years ago and remain critically endangered,” said Elizabeth Heppenheimer, a graduate student in the lab of Bridgett vonHoldt, an assistant professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton. Though red wolves were declared extinct in the wild by 1980, a team of biologists has found their DNA in a group of canines living on Galveston Island off the coast of Texas.
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