Wolf x coyote hybrids find a niche in the Northeast?

The John Hawks weblog, which I think is one of the best science blogs around,  and which I check daily, often has interesting stuff in it.  Dr. Hawks is a biological anthropologist working at the University of Wisconsin, and he has a range of biological anthropology-related interests, including, of course, the very important subject of human evolution.  He is also very interested in the subject of  gene "introgression", and he spends a good deal of time writing about it.  Genetic introgression , for those who  have never heard of this term, is basically the crossing-over of genetic material from one closely-related species to another.  Some species of organisms are well-known for interbreeding and producing perfectly fertile offspring. These species are very closely related; perhaps some of them are not "species" at all, but "subspecies", that is geographical variants of a very widespread, and adaptable larger species.  Where I live, there are two species or subspecies of gulls(though field guides always list them as two species!): "Western" gulls(Larus occidentalis) and "glaucous winged" gulls(Larus glaucescens).  They interbreed, and for all practical purposes, the gulls in the Puget Sound area are considered a hybrid group, no matter what they "look like". The thing both species(or subspecies, or whatever they are), have in common is -- pink feet!  Another complication, though it doesn't happen around here, is that "glaucous winged" gulls will also perfectly happily mate with "herring" gulls(Larus argentatus) in Western Alaska, at least.  "Herring" gulls also have pink feet.  And all these gulls are, shall we say, opportunistic generalists in their habits, and are very widespread across any number of habitats.  Which means that the "species" are known to exchange genes far and wide.  There are "glaucous winged" gulls in the Queen Charlotte Islands that have "western" gull genes, though the northern limit of "western" gull range is-- you guessed it -- Puget Sound.  And the southern limit of "glaucous winged" gull territory is Puget Sound and coastal Washington State. 

 

I go into such detail about these apparent species "mixtures" because while this idea is fairly new and controversial, at least in some circles, it appears that these sorts of "mixings'" are more common in nature, at least under certain circumstances, than a lot of people like to suppose.  And it's well-known among canid specialists(that is, people who study wolves, coyotes, jackals, etc), that all members of the genus Canis(wolves, coyotes, jackals, "red" wolves, etc). are "interfertile", that is, they can interbreed and produce fertile offspring.  And it's also well-known that some 75% of all "wolves" around the Great Lakes area, have mitochondrial DNA sequences associated with coyotes.  It appears that all the famous Isle Royale wolves, whose ups and downs have been closely monitored for some fifty years now, have "coyote genes", apparently inherited from some female coyote who mated with a male wolf in Ontario.  Some of the descendants of this pairing are the wolves who now inhabit Isle Royale.  It is also thought that these pairings are or were "one way", that is, female coyotes x male wolves. In a lot of cases, this may well be the case.  But now the John Hawks weblog has comments about a paper, and links to another paper about wolf/coyote hybridization that appear to show that many of the "coyotes" in the northeastern quadrant of the US  have "wolf" genes.  I'm not surprised at this, not at all.  Like the aforementioned gulls,both wolves and coyotes are opportunistic generalists.  Both live in a variety of environments, and there are a number of places where their environments overlap.  Coyotes are smaller in size and lighter in weight, and tend, as a rule to go after smaller prey than wolves, but otherwise, their habits are much the same: they howl, form packs, hunt together as a pack on occasion(though they do more "lone" hunting, for obvious reasons, than wolves), have the same gestation periods at the same times of year, depending on climate and latitude, dig dens and tend their young in pretty much the same way, etc., etc.  Coyotes, to the surprise of many who don't know much about the general habits of the genus Canis, not only form packs, but, at least until wolves were reintroduced to Yellowstone, hunted larger prey like elk and deer there(not quite as efficiently, though; that was one reason why wolves were reintroduced).  The "coywolves" of the northeastern US and southeastern Canada hunt deer, and are apparently good at it.  At the present time, though, these canids are generally classified as coyotes.  They intermediate in size between coyotes and wolves, have somewhat darker and furrier coats than coyotes in the western US.  This is probably a partly climatic adaptation; winters in the northeastern US  and southeastern Canada can get pretty cold.  And yes, they chow down on the local deer.   Nor are they "solitary", as the Hawks blog post implies other coyotes are.  But then, as I said, wherever they are not disturbed, coyotes actually form packs, just like wolves, and defend their territories, just like wolves.  They certainly do within the Seattle City limits; people have actually observed "several" coyotes acting together, and what they are observing is most likely a pack, just like wolves. 

 

In any case, John Hawks is very interested in this, because he is very interested in genetic introgression.  One might ask exactly what a biological anthropologist is doing,getting all excited about wolves, coyotes, and other wild canids, but there's method behind his apparent madness:  things like this may well have happened in the course of human evolution.  While I am not as excited about "introgression" of genes, per se, either in other organisms or in prehistoric humans of any kind, it may well be one mechanism which has made "us" what we are as a species, today.  And I have a feeling that there were human "hybrid zones" from time to time during the course of prehistory, and yeah, Neandertals were part of this.  Like wolves that nearly got wiped out by people shooting them, Neandertals had small, scattered populations that were vulnerable in various ways, and it's quite possible that some of them, from time to time, just got absorbed in early "modern" populations.  No enough to obviously "show", but enough to have possibly made an impact on early "modern" populations.  There isn't much evidence of this at the present, except possibly indirectly, but I suspect that  with more sophisticated genetic techniques, such traces might later be found.  Because, like wolves and coyotes, Neandertals and "moderns" had very, very similar coping strategies as I suggested in the previous post  So, I really think it stands to reason that "we" have acted, in the past, not too differently from the way wolves and coyotes are acting in the northeastern Us and southern Canada, at least as far as genetic exchanges are concerned  So thanks, Dr. Hawks, for providing me an excuse for another long, complex blog post!

Anne G

Writers' viewpoints, writer's "objectivity"?

It can be really interesting to get readers' comments. This is aside from the fact that I always welcome them, regardless of whether or not I completely agree with them. Mostly, I do agree with them. But even when I do, every so often there is one tht started me thinking. In a previous post, I mentioned that I'm "into" wolves, and a kind reader responded that when writing about wolves, one should be "objective" about them; they are part of nature, neither evil nor good. Now of course I agree with this, siince I happen to know a good deal about Canis lupus and its various relatives, and this knowledge actually, eventually spurred me, in a roundabout way, to start writing what I'm writing now. I should add, for the record, that in my Great Medieval Science Fiction Masterpiece With Neandertals, wolves don't come into it. I have some other things, set in the near future, where wolves do play a part. And it is this that got me thinking.

When I was growing up, wolves were almost always the "bad guys". And "we" were "right" to finish them off. This attitude is very old and rooted iin agricultural and pastoral pasts: when there is a danger of wolves eating your cows or sheep or goats or whatever, then they will be looked at as "the enemy". Never mind that they are just doing what they have evolved to do, namely catch vulnerable: weak, sick, very old, very young, "in the wrong place at the wrong time" prey, usually hoofed mammals, of which there are usually reasonably abundant numbers . Unless something in the environment has drastically changed.

So, for years, people shot wolves(and coyotes, their smaller and more adaptable cousins), pretty much on sight. But at about the same time as Farley Mowat's Never Cry Wolf was first published(again, for the record, I read it at about that time, but it didn't make much impression on me at first), an environmental consciousness began to flower, and people started looking at wolves quite differently. Yes, as the reader pointed out, after this time, some people started "idolizing" wolves as everything noble in nature, which, in my opinion is just as silly and unrealistic as "demonizing" them. But people who wanted to write anything that featured wolves, could not do what C.S. Lewis did in The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, where wolves are pretty much instruments of evil. This attitude, by the way, is rooted in certain medieval notions of wolves as aspects of the Devil. But even that attitude is rooted even more distantly in agricultural fears.

Be that as it may, far fewer people live off the land and practice agriculture any more. And in many parts of the world, wolves, and their environments, are constantly threatened by various forms of human intervention. Yet people's consciousnesses in most parts of the world have been raised to various degrees, so that now they actually value the environments they live in, not only as a place where "things they need" are produced, but as important in and of themselves, and important to preserve, for the people themselves. This consciousness is even setting in in a number of poor and developing countries where deforestation is extensive. Of course, these places don't have wolves, but they have creatures that are just as important in some symbolic way, and increasingly, people have made the choice to live with them.

This shift in consciousness was brought home to me after rereading the young adult book Viking Warrior, which I mentioned in another post, where the 15 year old hero encounters a wolf pack and thinks of fighting it, then decides the appearance of the pack is a sign from Odin, and "talks" the wolves out of trying to eat him. Nowadays, people just don't write about predators(wolves, bears, lions, etc), in anything like the way they used to, as "enemies" to be "bested" by "manly hunters", but are more likely to see them as "part of nature", though they may have to be careful in encountering them.

Which brings me to the meat of my question: Shouldn't a writer have a viewpoint? Shouldn't s/he express that viewpoint? Supoose they do "love wolves" and see them as "noble expressions of the greatness of nature" or the like? It may be a silly viewpoint, but it is a viewpoint, and more basically, isn't that the reason writers write? To express something they believe about their world, or something they believe in? I'm not suggesting writers and other creative people go on "political" crusades, though I know some who do. Rather, I'm suggesting that it is well-nigh impossible for anyone in a creative field not to have strong ideas or opinions about something. Wht else would make them want so much to be heard, that they take up the difficult task of writing it down, or painting it, or singing a song about it, or whatever they do? If such a person, for example, writes a poem about the nobility and grandeur of wolves in the natural world, and someone reads it, and ends up thinking it is silly, because they, the reader, thinks they are being "objective" about the p lace of wolves in nature, again, so what? It is one reader's opinion. To take another example, I don't much care for the current wave of what I call "Celtomania" in fiction and other places; I particularly don't like the endless stream of romances that feature hunks in kilts and are written about a Scotland that probably exists or existed only in their overheated imaginations, but I tell myself, okay, it's a viewpoint. A phony one, maybe, but a viewpoint still. And I could go on and on. In my view, writers must have a viewpooint, a belief. Otherwise, why write. I don't have to like it; I may end up beig very "objective" in pointing out that the writer's viewpoint is extreme or not grounded in reality, or whatever, but neither I, nor any other creatively inclined person, can ignore the fact that the person has a strong belief that they must express.

And this, by the way, is one of the things that makes "art"(and here, I mean any creative endeavor, no matter how "popular",) often a controversial enterprise. Because the author's viewpoint is probably never going to please everyone. Sometimes, such claims as the person makes are bizarre, such as in Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code, stringing Da Vinci, Templars, certain Catholic religious organizations, and a lot else, into(in my view) a dreadfully weird mix. But he really thinks he has an idea, and he's really making money off it. It's unfortunate, again in my view, that a lot of people believe much of what I consider complete, though quite entertaining, nonsense, but then, what can I say? I'm mixing Neandertals, medieval England, and some medieval "mythology" all together. Is my "mix" any weirder? I don't know. I am trying to make what I'm doing as historically accurate as I can, but I am sure that, if I can ever get it written and published, and people read it, there will be those who think my ideas are as bizarre in their way as those of Dan Brown. And, just for the record, I don't know what they'll think when I start doing the near future(with Neandertals, of course), and add wolves. . . .
Anne G