Red wolf (Canis rufus)
European settlement in North America led to a generalized reduction of top predators, including wolves, which also resulted in the expansion of coyotes, which were until then only present in western North America. Red wolves were though to inhabit the southeastern U.S. and by the 1960s were reduced to a single population on the border of Louisiana and Texas, which was thought to already hybridize with coyotes. The res wolf was then listed as endangered by the Endangered Species Act, and all individuals morphologically identified as red wolves were then captured and moved to a recovery area in North Carolina. However, the extent to which the modern recovery population genetically represents the pre-hybridization pure red wolf is currently unknown, and that has continuously created concerns regarding the validity of the protected status of the red wolf under the Endangered Species Act.
At the Waits' lab, I have been performing phylogenomic and ancestry analyses to help determine what proportion of the red wolf recovery population originates from pure red wolf, pre-hybridization, and thus help determine the validity of the protection status of this taxon. For that, I am analyzing RADseq data from samples of all North American canids [gray wolf, eastern (Algonquin) wolf, red wolf and coyote ] from across their current distributions, and multiple generations of red wolves from the recovery area, so that we can have a multi-scale perspective of the origin of red (and eastern) wolves, and are able to determine how much of that original gene pool is represented in the current population. |