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Post by Dusty on Jul 7, 2005 10:21:44 GMT -6
Never seen a wolf with a small foot or a coyote with a big foot either.
Then again, after I saw my first wolf I never had much doubt when I was looking at one or the other. Can't say that about wolves and dogs.
Wonder if Paul Wilson's ever skinned a wolf? Wonder if he'd change his story if he had?
Steve - you should come up here so you can pull the trigger when those wolves come in.
tman - that's a little bitty wolf track. It'd be a sled dog in this part of the world.
Dogs seem to have a lot in common with wolves because, like I said earlier, they are wolves. Canis lupus domesticus - as opposed to C. domesticus the old specific-level break. Yep, even yippy dogs.
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Post by kevinupp on Jul 7, 2005 10:24:01 GMT -6
"So, do bigger footed canines have bigger, uh, er, you know? "
Big feet... Big ears....
To steal a line from Jeff Foxworthy. "Being that goofy looking he'd better...."
To open another spectrum of thought on this.
I noticed on some of Zags pics that his coyotes are missing the stripe down the front legs.
I know there are color anomalies in all critters, but on some of his pics that stripe is totally missing. Not faded, Not moddled. Totally missing.
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Post by bobwendt on Jul 7, 2005 12:46:06 GMT -6
you guys ever see a jackel on the shows about africa. Look like a dink texas coyote to me, about 5 cents worth of difference if that.
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Post by Dusty on Jul 7, 2005 13:06:31 GMT -6
From Geographic distribution of selected canids (TIG JUNE 1993 vol. 9 no. 6):
The wolf-like canids are a closely related group of large carnivores whose chromosomes are stable in morphology and number (2n = 78). Because of the recent common ancestry of the members of this group, genes that have high rates of sequence substitution, such as those found in the vertebrate mitochondrial genome, can be used to resolve their phylogenetic relationships. A phylogenetic analysis of 736 bp of the mitochondrial cytochrome b gene revealed a close kinship of gray wolves, dogs, coyotes and Simien jackals. As a group, these three taxa were distinct from the African wild dog and from the golden, side-striped and black-backed jackals. The gray wolf and coyote may have had a recent common North American ancestor about two million years ago whereas the Simien jackal, found only in a small area of the Ethiopian highlands, is possibly an evolutionary relic of a past African invasion of gray wolf-like ancestors. The Simien jackal is the most endangered canid and should be called a wolf rather than a jackal to reflect its evolutionary heritage.
The jackals you most commonly see on TV are probably black-backed, a more distantly related critter.
You'd probably still end up with pups if you hucked a jackal - of any flavor - and a coyote into the same pen.
From the same paper:
Interspecific hybridization and the origin of the red wolf Species, such as wolves and coyotes, that are highly mobile and can interbreed under some conditions, may form large hybrid zones. Several hundred years ago, coyotes were numerous only in the southern United States and wolves were common toward the north. Where wolves are abundant, they will exclude the much smaller coyote from their territories. After the arrival of European settlers, agriculture and predator control programs caused wolf populations to dwindle, while the coyote, a remarkably flexible and opportunistic species, expanded its geographic range to areas north and east. Today the coyote is found throughout most of North America. In eastern Canada, an area invaded b coyotes in the last 100 years, several genotypes identical or very similar to those found in coyotes were discovered in individuals phenotypically identified as gray wolves. Wolves with these "coyote" genotypes increased in frequency toward the east, from 50% in Minnesota to 100% in Quebec. The hypothesis advanced to explain this pattern was that coyotes and wolves had hybridized in areas of eastern Canada where wolves were rare and coyotes common. The interspecific transfer of mtDNA was asymmetric; none of the coyotes sampled had wolf-like genotypes although coyote genotypes were common in gray wolves. Because mtDNA is maternally inherited without recombination, this result reflects a mating asymmetry: male wolves mate with female coyotes, and their offspring backcross to wolves. Either the reverse cross is rare, or the offspring of such backcrosses to coyotes do not reproduce. This mating asymmetry may indicate that the smaller male coyotes cannot inspire the larger female gray wolves to mate with them.
Theory predicts that older hybrid zones between wolves and coyotes may be much larger than that in eastern Canada, and may be up to several thousand kilometers in width. Accordingly, attention has been focused on a potentially older and more extensive hybrid zone in the southern United States. The zone includes populations of three wolf-like canids: the red wolf, gray wolf and coyote. The red wolf is intermediate in size between coyote and gray wolves and can potentially hybridize with both species. It is also an endangered species that became extinct in the wild about 1975, and descendants of the last populations were used to found a successful captive breeding and reintroduction program. If the red wolf were a distinct species ancestral to wolves and coyotes, there should be unique mtDNA genotypes that define a separate species clade, a pattern previously found in wolf-like canids.
However, captive red wolves had a genotype that was indistinguishable by restriction site analysis from those found in coyotes from Louisiana. Because hybridization was thought to occur between the two species as the red wolf became rare, the presence of the coyote-derived genotypes in captive red wolves could represent an accident of sampling and not be representative of the ancestral population. Subsequently, an additional mtDNA analysis of 77 samples obtained in about 1975 from areas inhabited by the last wild red wolves showed that all had either a coyote or gray wolf genotype.
Conceivably, hybridization between gray wolves and coyotes alone could explain the intermediate morphology of red wolves. To test this hypothesis, DNA was isolated from six museum skins of red wolves obtained from Five states in about 1910, a time before hybridization of red wolves and coyotes was thought to be common. Phylogenetic analysis of 398 bp of the cytochrome b gene showed that red wolves at that time did not have a distinct genotype; all six had genotypes classified with gray wolves or coyotes, a result consistent with a hybrid origin for the species. Although more research needs to be done, the implication of this result is troubling for the US Endangered Species Act because a policy on hybrids has not been formulated. In some situations we may wish to protect hybrids, such as the red wolf, because they are unique. Elsewhere, in Minnesota for example, hybridization may be undesirable because it jeopardizes the genetic integrity of the gray wolf, a threatened species. Similarly, in Italy, hybridization with domestic dogs may be changing the character of gray wolves that enter small towns to feed because their natural prey has been depleted. Even the highly endangered Simien jackal is threatened with hybridization by feral domestic dogs. Molecular genetic analyses offer a powerful means to determine if hybridization is changing the composition of these endangered populations. Future research on the population genetics of canids should focus on the analysis of polymorphic nuclear genes to complement the mtDNA data. However, nuclear DNA domains that evolve as fast as highly variable mtDNA regions have yet to be identified, and may not exist. Hypervariable simple sequence repeat loci38 may prove useful; these loci are abundant in the nuclear genome and evolve through loss or gain of repeat units rather than sequence substitutions. Analysis of simple sequence repeats will not provide the detailed picture of the succession of historical changes revealed by sequence data but may furnish estimates of gene flow and hybridization among closely related canid populations.
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Post by bobwendt on Jul 7, 2005 13:23:27 GMT -6
I guess "size" counts is what all that says. males say size doesn`t count, only the motion of the oceon. females say only the men say the above. apparently true in wild canines too. plus the old any port in a storm theory
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Post by Corey on Jul 7, 2005 14:14:45 GMT -6
Bob your cracking me up. LOL lol
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Post by Maineman on Jul 7, 2005 15:27:13 GMT -6
This seems to fit this discussion...Dave Z The Red Wolf: Is it a true species? canidae.ca/MTDNA.HTM It can be rather difficult to determine whether or not a population of organisms is a true species. This is because the word "species" is rather difficult to define. The most well-known species concept is the Biological Species Concept, which emphasizes reproductive isolation. The biological species concept defines a species as a population or a group of populations whose members have the potential to interbreed with one another in nature to produce fertile offspring, but who cannot interbreed with members of other species to produce viable, fertile offspring. By using this definition only, Canis rufus is not a true species, as it can hybridize with both Canis latrans (the coyote) and Canis lupus (the gray wolf). However, the biological species concept is usually not used to determine whether or not a certain population consitutes a separate species. This is true for several reasons. It can often be difficult to determine whether or not the members of two populations that live in two geographically isolated areas are capable of interbreeding. Also, it is often true that two populations that clearly represent two different species are capable of interbreeding and producing viable offspring. This can be said of wolves and jackals: They are clearly separate species, but they are capable of mating and producing fertile offspring. They do not since they are found on different continents. Canis lupus and Canis latrans are found on the same continent and are recognized as being two separate species even though they interbreed and produce fertile offspring. They are classified as separate species, however, since they rarely interbreed with each other. They have been known to only when the wolf population is stressed and individual wolves have trouble finding a con-specific mate. Relatively recent analyses of red wolf, gray wolf and coyote nuclear DNA and mtDNA seem to suggest that the red wolf is a coyote/gray wolf hybrid. mtDNA (mitochondrial DNA) is the DNA that is found in the mitochondrion of a cell. The mitochondrion is a cellular organelle that serves as the site of cellular respiration (ie it produces energy) and the DNA contained within it encodes the proteins that are needed for cellular respiration to occur. Nuclear DNA is the DNA that is found in the cell's nucleus. mtDNA is often used to determine the relationships between two closely related taxa that have evolved relatively recently because mtDNA contains several highly variable regions. Also, mtDNA is inherited maternally and nuclear DNA is inherited from both parents. In 1989, R. K. Wayne and J. L. Gittleman compared segments of mtDNA from red wolves with mtDNA from gray wolves and coyotes. They reasoned that if the red wolf is a unique species, that it would carry some sort of unique genetic trait that would make it distinct from coyotes and grey wolves. No such thing was found, and the mtDNA from the red wolves was found to be almost identical to mtDNA taken from coyotes in Louisiana. mtDNA samples saved from red wolves, coyotes and red wolf/coyote hybrids captured in Texas from 1974-76 were then analyzed. Again, no unique gene sequence was found in red wolf mtDNA. Genes sequences characteristic of coyotes and gray wolves was found, however. This seems to suggest that the red wolf is a hybrid between gray wolves and coyotes. However, in the last 100 years, coyotes had migrated to eastern Canada since wolf populations there had been declining, and some of the wolves there mated with coyotes, since there were so few wolves and so many coyotes. The hybrid offspring of a male gray wolf/female coyote mating would have only coyote mtDNA, though it would look like an intermediate between a wolf and a coyote. If such a hybrid mated back to a gray wolf, the offspring would look more wolf-like. Gradually, the coyote DNA from the original cross would disappear as more matings with pure wolves occur. However, these animals would still contain coyote mtDNA inherited from the original female coyote. Some gray wolves from eastern Canada and Minnesota have been found to carry coyote mtDNA. Considering this, it's possible that the red wolves analyzed in the study described above were actually red wolf-coyote hybids. As the red wolves began to disappear, they began to hybridize with coyotes, so earlier generations of red wolves may have been pure red wolves. Biologist Ron Nowak had proposed that red wolves had not yet began to hybridize with coyotes very much during the 1930s. So, mtDNA from red wolves that died before 1930 (the samples were taken from hides from the Smithsonian Institution's fur vault) was analyzed. Again, nothing was found that set the red wolf apart from gray wolves or coyotes. Red wolf, gray wolf and coyote nuclear DNA was then analyzed. Microsatelites, which are short sequences of nucleotides that are repeated at certain sites, were examined in each of the species, since the number of repeats varies from species to species. The DNA of hundreds of coyotes, red wolves and gray wolves was analyzed and again, nothing was found that suggested that the red wolf is a unique species. The microsatelites carried by the red wolves could be found in either coyotes or wolves. The same analysis was repeated by Michael S. Roy and Deborah Smith using DNA taken from the skins of red wolves that died before 1930. Roy and Smith looked at 10 different microsatelite regions in 16 different skins. And, again, nothing was found that showed that red wolves had diverged enough from gray wolves and coyotes to be considered a separate species. However, it still cannot be confirmed that the red wolf is not a separate species. The genetic techniques that were used to determine whether or not the red wolf originated as a hybrid have been critisized. It has also been pointed out that the specimens collected before 1930 may have been mis-identified by their collectors and could have belonged to coyotes or red wolf/coyote hybrids (There is no question that red wolves have hybridized with coyotes, but it is difficult to say when it began to occur extensively). Also, the analysis of fossil skulls has suggested that red wolves have lived in the southeastern United States for about 700 000 years. Other genetic studies have also suggested that the red wolf is a rather ancient species that may have existed before the gray wolf. Such studies have suggested that the wolves of eastern Canada may be a northern race of red wolf, and you can read more about this by clicking here. For more detailed information on this topic, and a discussion about whether or not the red wolf is worth conserving, read this article written by R. K. Wayne:
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Post by SteveCraig on Jul 7, 2005 18:42:51 GMT -6
Geez, Bob, You need to go to Md.!! You are at the top of your game for sure. I think a few people need you there in a BIG way! hehehe Steve
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Post by SteveCraig on Jul 7, 2005 18:45:47 GMT -6
Dusty, Been trying to do just that for the last 5 years, and cant seem to get there! Always something else to hunt or trap gets in the way. One of my buddies there in Fairbanks calls alot of wolves and Lynx. Fellow by the name of Ace Callaway. Ever heard of him? Steve
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Post by Dusty on Jul 7, 2005 22:26:24 GMT -6
Yea, I know Ace. He isn't getting around as well as he used to - don't think he's shooting many wolves anymore.
The lynx are coming up, and every indication is that the next couple years will be a better high than we've seen in the last few decades. If you wanna shoot a pile of lynx, you better get packing!
FWIW re: canid identification: we generally discourage shooting the wolves that are tied to one of those little stick-sleds.
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Post by Zagman on Jul 8, 2005 6:16:05 GMT -6
Relatively recent analyses of red wolf, gray wolf and coyote nuclear DNA and mtDNA seem to suggest that the red wolf is a coyote/gray wolf hybrid.
The genetic techniques that were used to determine whether or not the red wolf originated as a hybrid have been critisized. It has also been pointed out that the specimens collected before 1930 may have been mis-identified by their collectors and could have belonged to coyotes or red wolf/coyote hybrids (There is no question that red wolves have hybridized with coyotes, but it is difficult to say when it began to occur extensively).See why I am confused......like I said, there seems to be conflicting research out there...... Regardless of what these large-bodied, small-footed beasts are and where they came from, they are fun to trap as you really never know what you might get when you pull around the corner. KevinUpp: I have no idea about the dark legs vs. no dark legs.....generally, if it's a dark coyote, it has the dark legs. Lighter, western-looking coyotes, for the most part, do not have it..... Per Bob's request......a big-bodied, small-footed specimen......holding a large coyote LOL red wolves...... More red wolves from this year....had an over-abundance of the ugly SOB's this year. Wolf track, "somewhere in Montana"...... Coydog re-sized and re-posted, per Steve's request I have other pics of "coydogs", but they are so dog-like, I hesitate to post them here. Like Bob Wendt says, they act like a coyote in the trap, and their poo is coyote-poo...... There's no question what they are when you pull up to them, the way they act compared to a domestic.......but in hindsight, looking at the pics, I'm like "What did I do? Whack someone's dog?" Zagman
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Post by MChewk on Jul 8, 2005 6:29:09 GMT -6
So....is the "old" coydog theory that coydogs CANNOT breed and create more of the same void? Or are these animals mixes of coyotes, Red wolves, and domestic/feral dogs? And again I question the possible "liability" of trapping threatened/endangered species. At what point in the dna count does a coyote/wolf mix become more (Protected) wolf than coyote?
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Post by trappnman on Jul 8, 2005 7:33:45 GMT -6
I don't ever recall seeing where someone said coydogs can't breed- they can and do. What is different is their breeding times- fall opposed to early spring in winter and the fact they do not pair bond.
Since they cannot breed with cooytes in 2nd generation- they must breed with other coydogs or dogs- and if those pups survive the winter (not really natures time to be having pups) they to must breed back to coydogs.
Even if that scenerio exists- after but a few generations, the coyote would be so diluted that it wouldn't be a factor in any way-
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Post by MChewk on Jul 8, 2005 7:57:46 GMT -6
If I remember right...info said that since the genetic pool was somehow different and "coydogs" were sterile and couldn't reproduce? Any how spent way too much time dealing with the coydog/coyote and wolf mixes to see that reproduction wasn't a problem....lol
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Post by trappnman on Jul 8, 2005 8:07:30 GMT -6
Mike, you either misread it or the author didn't have a clue. I've read dozens of articles concerning research on coydogs- and never once read anything about them being sterile- in fact, 100% the opposite.
the key is that coyotes come into season, male and female- once a year, in the ealry spring- last part of Feb around here. Coydogs inhieret this trait of coming into season once a year (dogs come in every 4-8 months on average- generally one can figure 2x a year with domestic dogs.) but as one paper put it "nature played a cruel trick by having them come in once a year in October or so- add in the lack of pair bonding, and the survival of the pups is minimal at best"
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Post by Stef on Jul 8, 2005 8:47:42 GMT -6
Steve, Biologist say the same as Mike here. A coyote can breed with a dog but all pups will be sterile. I have papers somewhere who are saying that.
Mike, I've heard the opposite with wolf-coyote.... Its a non stop end!
Stef
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Post by trappnman on Jul 8, 2005 12:47:55 GMT -6
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Post by Zagman on Jul 8, 2005 13:50:31 GMT -6
That first website about coydogs......boy, maybe I have caught more coydogs than I think!
One thing is for sure, EVERY black "coyote" I have seen has that white blaze on it's chest just like the ones on that website. Everyone......
Hmmmmm.................
MZ
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Post by Dusty on Jul 8, 2005 13:53:46 GMT -6
Z - there seems to be conflicting research because _there is conflicting research_!
Good or bad, that's how science works - someone proposes an answer to a question, it gets published in the literature, and hopefully gets wider coverage than it otherwise would have. Someone comes along with a better technique, larger samples, a different model, whatever, and re-analyzes the question, then publishes their results. Sometimes they all jive. Sometimes they don't. Sometimes they seem to (or not), and someone comes along later and points out that they weren't really even addressing the same question.
The fundamental weakness here is, nobody can define "species." The Biological Species Concept works most of the time, but don't tell that to a dog or a mallard! Red-backed voles, Clethrionomys rutilus, are circumpolar - they occur in North America, Asia, Scandanavia, and Europe - all the same species. Why? Beats me - they sure haven't traded any DNA for the last few millenia, but they can when allowed to. Similar species - wolverines come to mind - have been split out into separate species. Why? Probably because the wolverine guy had a slightly different concept of species than the RBV guy! Science is a process to ask questions and propose answers - it never pretends to actually HAVE those answers.
My personal opinion is, it doesn't really matter. Species aren't managed - populations are (ie, lynx and wolves in AK are furbearers - in Colorado, they're sacred endangered "species"). Can I tell a wolf from a dog? Yep, but they're the same species. Can a wolf tell a wolf from a coyote? Apparently not, but they're different species. "Species," for the most part, is just a pigeonhole that allows us to communicate. Until it becomes a well-defined pigeonhole (and it never will for some species) that communication will be somewhat fuzzy.
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Post by pnwmtnmn on Jul 8, 2005 16:31:12 GMT -6
Well guys I don't have an answer for you to this hybrid problem you seem to be having However I do want to thank you for opening a market the the few coydogs I do get. Before the eastern U.S. started harvesting coyotes in numbers all the off colored (black, red, tan, etc.) coyotes I caught were worthless, throw em in the weeds, the furbuyers wouldn't touch them, now they ship em back east ;D . We only get one or two a year that aren't normal colored, normal for here anyway. Personally, I feel that all hybrids need to be removed from a breeding population so that the powers that be will have a "standard" to go by,like dog breeders have. Our job is to remove the "blurring" of the "standard" so that scientist don't get confused. I realize that this is an oversimplfication of the process and of the facts but it 's the way I feel.
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