Isle man spurred red wolf DNA discovery
Coyote pack linked to almost extinct species
GALVESTON — The coyotes Ron Wooten spotted on Galveston Island’s west end had eye-catching dark, reddish fur and long, slender builds. In the golden dusk of that July evening in 2013, about a dozen of the animals rested in what appeared to be a wetland dried by a seasonal drought.
These canids — mammals of the dog family — looked different. Most coyotes that inhabit this region have gray or pale-brown fur. And while coyotes typically scavenge alone or in pairs, these appeared to be traveling and interacting as a pack.
Wooten had a hunch he had stumbled onto something more important than satisfying his hobby as a wildlife photographer.
“They didn’t look like coyotes at all. I thought they actually looked like a big Great Dane or something like that,” Wooten said. “I looked at some images of red wolves, and it kind of looked like they might
have been leaning more towards red wolves than coyotes, so that’s when I started pursuing somebody to take a look at these animals.”
Nearly six years later, Wooten learned that his photographs played a significant role in a groundbreaking genetic study released in December by a group of scientists led by biologists from Princeton University. The study suggests that canids native to Galveston Island carry DNA elements of the red wolf, an animal declared extinct in the wild nearly 40 years ago but with ancestry that has endured in parts of the eastern United States and Gulf Coast, including southern Texas and Louisiana.
Red wolves inhabited the southeastern United States before being declared extinct in the wild in 1980 due to habitat loss, predator control programs, disease, and, ironically, interbreeding with coyotes. A captive breeding program developed in the 1970s helped stave off total extinction, with 14 red wolves able to reproduce.
That success led to the reintroduction of red wolves into the wild in North Carolina. That experimental population immediately dwindled, with fewer than 40 pure red wolves now surviving in the wild.
Some scientists theorized that red wolves began interbreeding with coyotes, in part, as a means of survival. The study that Wooten contributed to, published in Genes, a scientific journal, further reinforces the notion that red wolves have persisted through interbreeding.
Dead coyotes prompt inquiry
This latest discovery began with road kill.
Several months after spotting the pack of coyotes in Galveston, Wooten, a regulatory specialist for the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, spotted two dead coyotes with similar reddish fur on his commute along FM 3005. Intrigued, Wooten scooped up the remains, hoping the carcasses might pique the interest of someone who studied wolves and coyotes professionally. He preserved the tissue samples the only way he knew how — in his freezer.
“Of course, my wife loved that,” Wooten said.
Several wildlife agencies rebuffed Wooten before he finally connected with a group of wolf biologists who put him in touch with Bridgett vonHoldt, a biologist at Princeton University. VonHoldt had been studying genetics shared between North American canids for a number of years, and Wooten’s tissue samples and photos presented possible evidence of “ghost alleles” — surviving red wolf genes different from those of the red wolves in zoos or those in the wild in North Carolina.
VonHoldt, in an email interview, said it was “phenomenal” that Wooten had both pictures and tissue samples of the canids found in Galveston. The eye-catching photos he took of the pack of coyotes with reddish fur caught her her interest.
“Coyotes have a wide range of variation in colors and markings,” vonHoldt said. “But the photo from Ron just somehow caught my interest as being unique in a very specific way.”
VonHoldt and her team extracted and processed the DNA from Wooten’s samples and compared it to each of the legally recognized wild canid species in North America, including samples from 29 coyotes from Alabama, Louisiana, Oklahoma and Texas; 10 gray wolves from Yellowstone National Park; 10 eastern wolves from Algonquin Provincial Park in Ontario; and 11 red wolves from the captive breeding program.
They found that the Galveston Island animals were more similar to captive red wolves than to typical southeastern coyotes — one of Wooten’s samples was 70 percent red wolf, while the other was 40 percent red wolf.
Downplays his role
Wooten learned of the discovery when the study was published. Although he downplayed his role, he was credited in the study as a “wildlife biologist” — prestigious nomenclature for a part-time naturalist.
“I was kind of hoping they might be 100 percent red wolf. That wasn’t the case,” Wooten said.
The latest red wolf gene study, along with a similar discovery of red wolf genes in the Louisiana canid population, has piqued the interest of wolf experts like Ron Nowak, a former zoologist for the U.S. Fish Wildlife Service and an expert on the species.
Nowak cautioned that while the gene study does not represent a “rediscovery of an extinct species,” it should prompt further genetic studies to determine the prevalence of red wolf DNA across the country.
“Whether this is simply a persistence of genes because they’ve maintained some adaptive benefit to the animals or whether there just might be some population that might be still predominantly red wolf, this has not been thoroughly investigated, and we still hope some further study might be done to see what we might learn,” Nowak said.
Nowak added that the National Academy of Sciences has a Congressional mandate to study the taxonomy of red wolves, with a final report due sometime in the spring that could yield additional information.
VonHoldt said her top priority is to avoid inbreeding while maintaining and increasing genetic diversity in the wild canid population.
For his part, Wooten believes the red wolf gene discovery eventually could lead to further ecotourism along the Texas coast and specifically in Galveston, already a nesting ground for native endangered species like the Kemp’s Ridley sea turtle.
“We have the red wolf hybrids, which are some of the most endangered canines in the world; that really puts Galveston in quite a light,” Wooten said. “It’s very special and you have to approach it from that aspect; you have to make sure that we’re pushing this in a positive way and try to make this something good for everybody here in this area.”