Guest Essay by Kip Hansen
Carl Zimmer of the New York Times gives us this story: DNA Study Reveals the One and Only Wolf Species in North America.
“The first large study of North American wolf genomes has found that there is only one species on the continent: the gray wolf. Two other purported species, the Eastern wolf and the red wolf, are mixes of gray wolf and coyote DNA, the scientists behind the study concluded.
The finding, announced Wednesday, highlights the shortcomings of laws intended to protect endangered species, as such laws lag far behind scientific research into the evolution of species.”
Bridgett M. vonHoldt of Princeton University who studies the genome of the canids (mammals of the dog family – Canidae) – that is domestic and wild dogs, wolves, foxes, jackals and dingoes — in her most recent study, highlighted by Zimmer, concludes that all North American wolves are genetically one species with variants, like the Eastern Wolf and the Red Wolf, being hybrids between Grey Wolves (Canis lupus) and the Coyote (Canis latrans).
Interesting, but so what?
Two months ago, in the same newspaper, Joanna Klein, writing in the science section’s Trilobites series, gave us: Red Wolves Need Emergency Protection, Conservationists Say.
“Conservation groups submitted an emergency petition last week requesting that the United States Fish and Wildlife Service increase protection for the only wild population of red wolves left in the world.
Red wolves, which are bigger than coyotes, but smaller than gray wolves, are the only wolf species found completely within the United States.”
….
“It also seeks an upgrading of the status of red wolves, which are endangered, from “nonessential” to “essential.” The change in status would grant reserved habitat to the species and require consultations with biologists over how changes to land use would affect the wolves.”
At the end of May, conservationists were lobbying the Federal Fish and Wildlife Service to declare the Red Wolf an “essential” species, in part because the “North Carolina’s Wildlife Resources Commission, a state-run conservation agency funded in part by the sale of hunting and fishing licenses, which has called the [federal Red Wolf Recovery Program] a failure and claimed that wolves have damaged private land.” The details of the program themselves are a matter of controversy and conflict between state and federal biologists.
Carl Zimmer reports that “The gray wolf and red wolf were listed as endangered in the lower 48 states under the Endangered Species Act in the 1970s and remain protected today, to the periodic consternation of ranchers and agricultural interests. In 2013, the United States Fish and Wildlife Service recognized the Eastern wolf as a separate species, which led officials to recommend delisting the gray wolf. Conservationists won a lawsuit that forced the agency to abandon the plan.”
Furthermore, vanHoldt’s study not only identifies the three canids (Grey, Eastern and Red wolves) as a single species (albeit, the latter two are wolf-coyote hybrids), but her paper states bluntly:
“The red wolf was listed as an endangered species in 1973, initiating a captive breeding program by the USFWS. The program began with 12 of 14 founding individuals that reproduced, selected from a panel of several hundred captured individuals that were thought to represent the ancestry spectrum ranging from coyote to pure red wolf and various admixtures of the two forms. These 12 founders were considered to be pure red wolves based on phenotypic characteristics and the lack of segregation of “coyote-like” traits in their offspring. The descendants of these founders defined the ancestry of the several hundred red wolves produced by the captive breeding program and have been the source for a single reintroduced population in eastern North Carolina.”
The sad fact is that not only is the Red Wolf known to be a hybrid of the Grey Wolf and the Coyote, and has always been since it was first identified and studied, believed to have originated in the last century, but the Red Wolves of North Carolina are a human created species, created in an intentional federally financed breeding program, similar to the creating and breeding of dog breeds. Well intended but hardly the purpose of the Endangered Species Act
vanHoldt and her team use their study to encourage the extension of the Endangered Species Act to cover such hybrids.
Why write of this little biologists’ tiff here?
To me, it demonstrates how far astray science and the science/policy interface can drift when the science itself is vague, blurry — based on words and concepts that do not have solid, agreed-upon definitions that are based on solid science understandings.
The word in this story is SPECIES. If you think that there is one and only one common and agreed upon definition of the word species in the world of biology, you have been criminally under-educated or remain willfully misinformed. For a brief glimpse of the controversy, you can look at the entirely unauthoritative Species Problem wiki page, which states “there are at least 26 recognized species concepts.”
Several years ago, I personally attempted to discover the “current definition” of species being used by academic biologists. I had foolishly believed that they must have one, by this time, 40 years after my university education. My search finally ended when I had a protracted email conversation with a well-respected, well placed academic biologist, whom I had approached based on my digging deep into some journal article of his. We had quite an extensive discussion only to arrive at his admission that “biology, as a subject, does not have a firm definition of species – never has – and may never have.”
This lack of a firm, scientifically-based definition makes the application science-related policies, enshrined as law, such as the Endangered Species Act – which can have far-reaching social and economic effects on civil society – problematic at best and, worse, subject to “science fads” and whimsy.
# # # # #
Author’s Comment Policy:
As always, I will be glad to answer your questions about my experience with the definition of the word species.
This essay is a simple comment on the implications of science and science-based-policy that depend on vague definitions and the trouble it can cause.
Disclosure: I once owned a German Shepard/Wolf cross who was a sweet thing but had the unfortunate habit of playing too rough with my four small children – she would race alongside of them, leap up, take them in her teeth by the backs of their necks, and throw them to the ground, place her fore-paws on their chests and woof: “I win!”. I placed her with an ex-soldier who worked with dogs.
# # # # #
Discover more from Watts Up With That?
Subscribe to get the latest posts sent to your email.
If the definition of species is still open then one can make a very strong case that titles such as the ENDANGERED SPECIES ACT are without meaning. from now on we should all treat it that way.
Personally I’ll stick with the old definition that only living organisms of the same species can produce offspring who/which are themselves fertile. In other words, can continue to procreate the ‘species’.
Domination of Nature. Who should? All of us or Marxism?
Take a look at the Triangle Of Wu
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Triangle_of_U
and you will find a rather striking contrary example. Three different species crossed in pairs giving a set of three new polyploid species groups in the cabbages, kales, mustards, turnips, etc etc brassica bunch.
Corn (maize) has been shown to be a cross of teocinte and a grass, both different species. Doing the cross has shown the thesis works.
The “species barrier” is really a species strong suggestion… and for many plants, only a modest suggestion…
Isn’t the sausage dog a descendant of a wolf as are all dog breeds except for maybe the thylacine? In Australia we have the dingo of which very few original dogs remain , the rest have bred with domestic dogs and as such are determined to be wild dogs and an undesirable species with a bounty on their scalp .
The thylacine wasn’t a dog. It wasn’t even a placental mammal. It was a marsupial with convergent evolution toward a dog-like state.
Dachshunds are, like all dogs, domesticated wolves, bred by artificial selection in some cases to vary from their ancestors dramatically.
Reply to Robert from oz ==> The dachshund is a ‘breed’ of the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris) whose ancestry is still subject to some uncertainty. The latest guess is “extensive genetic studies undertaken during the 2010s indicate that dogs diverged from an extinct wolf-like canid in Eurasia 40,000 years ago.” vanHoldt, author of the study that prompted this essay, is part of a larger group of biologists trying to sort out the genome of the Canids.
Reply to NW sage ==> You can stick to it all you want — that’s the definition that the majority of lay persons think is actually being used. Unfortunately, it is not.
The USFWS thinks the wolf/coyote cross commonly called the Red Wolf — created through selective breeding by the USFWS — which will and does happily breed and produce viable offspring with any other canid it runs across — be it wolf, coyote or dog — is a valid species that must be protected under the ESA — even though it would not exist if the USFWS didn’t keep breeding it and releasing it into the wild.
That pragmatic fact rather dispels the species concept you prefer.
Well, I am not a lawyer, though my family is infested with them. From the informal education I have gotten from them, the term ‘species’ must be defined in the original Endangered Species Act, and all agencies acting under that Act must use that definition. It is possible, though, for the Act to give those agencies the power to define the word, themselves. However, that must be explicitly stated.
Absent any definition or legal treatment of the word in the Act, the entire Act is subject to being ruled unconstitutionally vague.
Wrote about this extensively in essay No Bodies in ebook Blowing Smoke. There is also a similar issue concerning polar bears.
The old simple species distinctions of failed interbreeding do not work. Coyotes clearly are a different species from wolves. They are smaller by half, hunt individually, feed on small prey (field mice being a favorite on my farm). Wolves are larger by half, hunt in packs, and prey on large game like deer and moose.
But there are coywolf hybrids like the ‘eastern wolf’ (50-50) and the ‘red wolf’ (25-75). Former can take deer, latter can take rabbits and turkeys.
We had most likely a coywolf breeding pair denning on my SW Wisconsin farm two years ago amongst the spring harvest alfalfa bales (plastic wrapped, left out on the field edges per modern practices). Likely an ‘eastern wolf’ type male hybrid, stood twice as tall as our coyotes. Howled like a wolf, not yapping like a coyote, at night that fall’s November deer hunt. Once you have heard the difference, there is no mistaking it. All of us (9 including brothers, sons, and daughter in laws).
That family coywolf pack was taking whitetail deer, no doubt. We saw several kill remains. Not a big deal, as we still took 9 whitetails in 3 days hunting on the farm. Pack did not attack the ~350 dairy cows. We did move all the summer calves to penned shelters near the three joint barns that summer and fall. But decided to let nature take its beautiful course. The coywolf pack left for parts unknown that winter. Big snows, so perhaps they went further south into deer infested northern Illinois. Nature is grand.
ristvan ==> Thanks for sharing your personal story with wolves and their hybrids. My maternal grandparents dairy farmed in SW Wisconsin in the 1940s-50s.
Some coywolves actually have domestic dog (German Shepherd, Doberman, etc.) genes mixed in. They are highly intelligent and adaptable – which is perhaps just as well. Without doubt, their purebred cousin, the Grey Wolf, has been ruthlessly persecuted in the American wild, and still is, under the guise of ‘wildlife management’. Good to hear of a farming family willing to tolerate the presence of large predators without wanting to drive them out/shoot them.
Male lions and female tigers can interbreed to produce “ligers” http://ligerliger.com/ “Tigons” are the offspring of male tigers and female lions. Both sets of hybrids are fertile and interfertile.
As for the first example in the article (grey wolves), let me be the first to say… 50 shades of grey wolf.
Now that be some funny sheeat, dog!
Given the weird definition of “species”, and American legal shennanigans, here’s a “reductio ad absurdum” scenario that might be “interesting”…
* EPA declares 2 genetically equivalant, but differently-coloured animal goups to be separate species
* find an inter-racial couple with children, and charge them both with “bestiality”, based on the loose definition of “species”.
* popcorn
Those greens are braindead I am unable to laugh at while choking unbelieving.
This is listed in the definition section of the Endangered Species Act.
The term “species” includes any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants, and any distinct population segment of any species of vertebrate fish or wildlife which interbreeds when mature.”
It seems to me that a hybrid of the species would qualify as a “subspecies.”
But what do I know? I was a personal injury attorney for 35 years before I retired. I never handled environmental cases.
But my gut tells me you probably would lose your argument in court if you think hybrids are not a protected species when endangered subspecies are protected as well.
You can’t extinct Camille tea with citrate by casting it out of the window – just fetch another one.
Every time wolf meets coyotes the reproduction starts anew.
Reply to David Mills ==> vanHoldt and team argue in their paper (linked in the essay) for the protection of these hybrid entities — as her paper may result in the Red and Eastern Wolves being officially “undeclared” separate species.
That the ESA includes a clause that allows for “subspecies” — it doesn’t solve the problem of Biology not having a firm and agreed upon definition for the larger grouping, a species.
This following is from the definition section of the Endangered Species Act.
“The term “species” includes any subspecies of fish or wildlife or plants, and any distinct population segment of any species of vertebrate fish or wildlife which interbreeds when mature.”
My guess is that if you were attempting to argue that hybrids were not a protected species under the Act, a judge would not find your argument convincing based on this statute.
But what do I know? I was just a personal injury attorney for 35 years before I retired. I never handled an environmental case.
Sad but true. Both snail darter and Northern spotted owl were not unique species.
All the ESA/environmental turmoil is largely caused by all the lawsuits from the greens whose entire existence is dedicated to making sure the government does not do ANYTHING to Gaia without the express consent of the green lobby. Even if an agency/entity (USFW, Forest Service, etc.) wants to cut a program or manage an area/species differently, said agency/entity must first get past the bazillion lawsuits, impact studies, comment periods, lawsuits, new impact studies because the original ones are out of date (thanks to the dragged out lawsuits), more comment periods, lawsuits…
Whatever the red wolf program costs, it may still be cheaper than trying to dismantle it.
foxes are not canids- vulpes vulpes is the “scientific” name for red fox-all foxes are some version of vulpes.
Foxes are canids, ie members of the dog family, Canidae, which includes wolves (also dogs), foxes and jackals.
No,foxes are most certainly not canids-nor are they members of the dog family,no vulpes can interbreed with any canid- ~~~snip~~~ (WUWT policy violation — mod)
Reply to Gabro and gamegetterII ==> The taxonomical Family is Canidae, under which one finds the Genera : Canis, Cuon, Lycaon, Cerdocyon, Chrysocyon, Speothos, Vulpes, Nyctereutes, Otocyon and Urocyon . True foxes are in the genus Vulpes.
The members of taxonomic Families do not interbreed — strictly, interbreeding can only happen inside of Species.
Good place to watch this again from long ago. Starts off with extinction of species, He was ahead of his time, so to speak:
We have the same sort of problem in Australia with the Dingo. It’s been around something like ?5000 years in Australia, but it is essentially just a wild dog, brought over by people from nearby Indonesia/PNG. It doesn’t bark, and uses deliberate deception when hunting, which is an interesting side-curiosity. It is known to attack people, especially children and infants, if given the chance.
People often refer to it as a separate species, and it is listed as such within National Park proposals, conservation programs, and such. It breeds with domestic dogs as one would expect. It isn’t a separate species.
This brings to mind a couple other videos about Dingos – sorry I just couldn’t help it::
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Hwd0iomlM1Y
Yes, and there was something else about the whole Azaria episode which bears a mention.
The film about Lindy concentrates on media (and police) distortion, which was certainly part of the injustice of her sentence, but scientific distortion, I’m sorry to say, also played a part.
Some influential scientists were adamant and stated on record that Dingos would not attack children and infants. This was part of the reason that the media and police went after Lindy Chamberlain. It was, and still is, part of an ideological view often prevalent, that nature is generally good, and people are usually to blame. So Dingos attacking infants was supposed to part of our fear and misrepresentation of nature. It also conveniently puts conservation programs and agendas in a more rose-colored light, since often they can only receive widespread support if unpleasant or inconvenient truths are hidden or distorted, which is what the above article is also about.
Years later, when dingo attacks on infants, children and even adults was documented, including some deaths, this view was seen for what it is, an ideologically-driven distortion.
English is not precise, and science terms are matters of degree. A species is an ambiguous term like the term mineral is. Minerals are not fixed composition, so they are all really rocks, just less obviously so than others. I can see in the literature, as more precise analysis of minerals is available, our minerals are becoming rocks (mixed minerals). So in these environmental cases, the degree of the definition has to be specified. My understanding is that phenotypes (species subtypes) are a part of the Endangered Species Act. So the other two wolves are phenotypes.
Mineral is not an ambiguous term. They may have impurities, but mostly those impurities are replacing an atom with identical valence properties. Rose quartz and smokey quartz are the same mineral because the vast majority of their composition is SiO2 arranged in a tetrahedral crystal lattice, the impurities replacing a few atoms makes them different varieties just like there are varieties within a species.
And it is well understood that each specimen is unique, just like each individual within a species is unique, there is no confusion like there with precisely what a species is.
If something is more complex like you are alluding to, then calling it by a group name is generally good enough unless you are writing a geochemical paper. For instance, a sample of copiapite will never be pure copiapite, but instead a blend of copiapite group minerals and other minerals. No one would call a good specimen a rock even though it contains a multitude of minerals.
It’s simply understood that nothing is 100% pure, and if there is enough of a secondary mineral to make it significant, it is generally said mineral X with Y or on Y. I.e. you would never call the following specimen a rock type or rock in general, but instead call it beryl with muscovite.
http://washingtondc.picturesofus.net/Museums/Smithsonian/National%20Museum%20of%20Natural%20History/Gems%20and%20Minerals/Aquamarine%20Beryl%20With%20Muscovite.JPG
If the Red Wolf is a critically endangered species, the Pom-Corgi-Papillion-Chinchilla is doomed. There’s only one and she’s been spayed.
http://i90.photobucket.com/albums/k247/dhm1353/dhm1353163/20160731_074739_zpsr5jln3cn.jpg
Reply to Middleton ==> R.I.P. the Pom-Corgi-Papillion-Chinchilla.
Kip
I enjoyed this article. You might enjoy Nancy McIntyre’s recent book, “Rush of River Over Rock” which is the story of her relationship with a wolf-dog in Virginia that showed up (young) at her cabin deep in the woods. It was well behaved until it started to ‘worry goats’, as they say. She moved.
She is now 81 and living in western NC. Last summer she had a bear sleeping under her porch every night until hibernation started. It seems there is still plenty of ‘wild’ on the old Frontier.
Reply to Crispin ==> I’ll check it out — for others, here’s the link.
The only thing that matters is how each individual wolf identifies emotionally. Their species identity has nothing to do with biology but everything to do with their freedom to pursue their own purpose in nature. we need to launch new programs to study and protect these wonderful creatures so we can understand more.
So that means that any wolf can use any tree he identifies with?
Guest Essay by Kip Hansen
Thank you for this excellent essay. The so-called Red Wolf program is just another scam but of lesser magnitude than Global Warming. I have written my congressman and once post a comment or two about it here on WUWT. I have contacted the Virginia Department of Game and Inland Fisheries and discussed it with multiple wildlife biologists. This was over 20 tears ago. I also brought up the issue with the outdoor sports writers in the local newspaper.
While doing research on so-called Red Wolf program I saved a trove of email links to support my claims that the explosion of so-called coyotes in Virginia may be related to the Red Wolf program. After bringing this to light with the various contacts as noted above there was a wholesale disappearance of valid links.
The program should be shut down immediately, and not even phased out. An investigation should be done and those who knowingly promoting it should be criminally charged.
This has been a multi million dollar scam against the taxpayers. Read up on it if you can find related links anymore. It will make you cringe. A federal court case in Tennessee (I believe) provided DNA evidence that the problem “wolves” were simply a hybrid coyote-grey wolf as released in the Cades Cove area of NW North Carolina.
One good question needs to be asked: Of the approx. 450 captured “wolves” from the Texas/Louisiana coastal region of which the 12 original breeders were selected, What did they do with the rest of them? What about the offspring that did not meet the set criteria self chosen expert?
There are a lot more questions that need to be asked and answered truthfully. I would like to advise any congressional panel on this. It stinks and the bad genie has been released. The government has released a plague into our countryside through this ill advised program.
I first learned about the weaknesses of the biologic understanding of “species” while I was learning paleontology. Essentially, under the conventional and outdated biologic definition of species, evolution isn’t even possible. It’s a good example of how conventional wisdom in science hinders its progress and of how new direct observations and data can be completely ignored from the “consensus” or “establishment”.
And of course this outdated understanding of what species is, is completely misused and abused by the Left (mostly through the endangered species act, ESA), and the Right seems too inept and discombobulated to bring the issue to light and fix it.
I had to deal with the abuse recently, when environmental groups used sue and settle tactics to extort the FWS into listing the lesser prairie chicken as a threatened species. This extortion was passed directly onto local governments, utility companies, wind farm operators, but was mostly directed at the oil and gas industry.
Soft science (which has sadly infected the science of biology) was used for the entire process of listing the “species” and hard science was ignored. Hard facts, like that this particular species can and does interbreed and produce fertile offspring with the greater prairie chicken and possibly other grouse species with overlapping ranges, that this bird’s population is highly dynamic from year to year and mostly decreased by spring-early summer drought, that breeding and raising of the chicks required diverse prairie plant species with intact sage or other native shrubs — which is often removed via herbicides by ranchers, leaving only certain preferred grasses or cropland.
The fact that prairie grouse don’t adjust well to conversion from native prairie to cropland or pasture was ignored (not to mention they are now competing with the much more highly adaptable Asian pheasant) because it’s much harder to garner public support to decrease food supply, extort ranchers, or destroy the introduced pheasant population than it is to garner support to extort industry.
Instead, soft science biological terms were relied upon, like “mean avoidance behaviors”, to target oil and gas drilling activity to create these highly imaginative 300 meter buffer zones around pump jacks that supposedly left those areas devoid of prairie grouse. The operator of wells in these areas were literally extorted for up to $108,000 per well (nothing was mandatory, but the threat of lawsuit under the ESA, which can be filed by anyone, for “take” of a chicken, which includes simply scaring them) to go to the range-wide plan to set aside land for conversation. And in classic nu-soft science fashion, they began population records the year before a major drought and subsequently used just the two data points to advocate the idea that the species was rapidly dying off.
Luckily a federal judge in Texas as well as the appeals court has deemed that the FWS did not perform due diligence prior to listing the species.
In my opinion, the prairie grouse species of North America are allopatric variants of the same species, considering their ability and choice to breed and produce fertile offspring in the wild. And if this is the case, their overall population is doing just fine.
Reply to Robert W Turner ==> Thank you for this practical example of the harms that can be done due to a simple lack of a definition of a very important word in Biology. I’m glad good sense prevailed.
The allegedly endangered Northern Spotted Owl, which was used to shut down logging in the Pacific NW, is at most a subspecies of the Southern Spotted Owl, which is not endangered.
..Wouldn’t a sub-species just be an animal adapting to a new environment by natural selection, ..kinda like the Grizzly to the Polar Bear ??…( “Grolar Bear”…)
Reply to marcus ==> What you describe, the polar and grizzly bear cross, is a “hybrid” between two members of same Genus (Ursus) but officially different species.
That is not the same as a sub-species. The Grizzly is a sub-species of Brown Bear (Ursus arctos) — thus its official name: Ursus arctos horribilis, the third name being that of the sub-species.
I have another related question, why does biology try so hard, or if you prefer-strongly trend towards, forming ‘species’/groups to begin with? Why doesn’t it just leave individuals and groups in cross-breeding/panmixing situations? There would be alot less ‘extinction’ going on.
Reply to thingodonta ==> You ask a philosophical question…why does biology (well, mankind really) try to put things into an understandable order?
That is partly what Science is about, trying to figure out the order in the apparent chaos that is the natural world. So, all those “horse-looking critters” we will call an animal Family and name that family Equidae. It includes horses, donkeys, and zebras. It is obvious that the riding horse and the zebra a quite different…so one gets named Equus ferus caballus (the domesticated horse, all of them) and the other Equus zebra.
Those types of choices are fairly easy – but trying to sort out the beetles……
For taxonomic biologists, it is often a life-long goal to find and name a new species — if you want to know why, you’ll have to ask one.
It would be better, of course, if biology had a set definition of species — but alas, it does not.
In reply to Kip-I think you have partly answered the question, but it wasn’t really about how humans classify or ‘order’, but more why biology itself seems to form groups and ‘order’. To be more specific, biology does tend towards creating reproducing populations, separated from other populations-we call this tendency ‘species’. I don’t fully know why it does this, but have a few ideas (e.g. forming groups of ‘like with like’, tends to protect such groups, same as birds flocking together).
As someone also once said to me of Dawkins very good idea about selfish genes, yes genes replicate themselves and so create these huge bodies and organisms like us over millions of years simply to perpetuate themselves, but the question might be asked, why do genes need to replicate in the first place?. What for? ‘To survive’, doesn’t really answer the question; why survive and perpetuate in the first place?, nothing else in chemistry seems to do this. Chemical reactions don’t just ‘keep going just to keep going’, ‘gene replication’ seems to be rather unique in this respect. But that’s for another day.
Genes don’t need to replicate. They just do.
Might as well ask why the universe needs to expand, why crystals need to grow or why hydrogen needs to bond chemically with oxygen or under other circumstances fuse into helium.
Species form because some organisms are more closely related to each other than to others. Populations of reproducing organisms become separated or new mutations arise and formerly more closely related living things become more distantly related.
One popular definition of life is that it is “a self-sustaining chemical system capable of Darwinian evolution”. This lets (most) viruses out, since they’re (generally) not self-sustaining, although they do evolve.
Just caught this story…it illustrates the value system of “experts” in this field making apparently unilateral decisions that can/do adversely impact other people without proper notification and input (and trying to hide the facts in the process). It appears that a government “of the people, for the people, and by the people” is a thing of the past, if indeed it ever existed.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/08/01/feds-released-dangerous-wolves-into-wild.html?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=feed&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+foxnews%2Fpolitics+%28Internal+-+Politics+-+Text%29
Mexican Grey Wolf Recovery Program ==> This is a similar effort to the program for Red Wolves in North Carolina. A full investigation was done and the report is available here.
Science News covers the wolf study here..
Conservationists and Environmentalists are also two very closely related groups – possibly the same species? They both seem to like to redefine their terms frequently for their own convenience – ‘species’ and ‘climate’.
Modern biology doesn’t need a precise definition of species, since it recognizes that species are mutable, not immutable as usually believed before Darwin and Wallace. They shade into each other in many cases, ie ring species, rather than being separated by bright lines, although that’s common, too, as in the case of humans and our closest living relatives, chimps and bonobos. For that matter, while common chimps and bonobos can mate and produce fertile offspring in captivity, they normally don’t and are largely geographically separate in the wild.
Modern taxonomy, based upon phylogeny using cladistic, statistical methods, necessarily diverges from the old Linnaean system, although biologists still refer to species, genera, families, orders, classes and phyla, as well as to clades (natural groups) ending in “-iformes” or “-morpha”.
Hence Sauropodomorpha is recognized as a suborder of the Order Saurischia, consisting of the plant-eating prosauropods and their sauropod relatives and descendants, which became the largest land animals of all time. The other saurischian suborder is Tetrapoda, the bipedal, mostly carnivorous dinosaurs.
The other order in the Superorder Dinosauria is Ornithischia, which includes mainly herbivorous, beaked dinosaurs.
Reply to Gabro ==> Biology might not need a definition, but when such a vague biological concept is written into federal law with wide-reaching powers to take property, restrict use of lands, and protect private property (such as livestock) then it becomes VERY important that everyone knows what we mean when we say species or we’ll have the government protecting an accidental hybrid like the Eastern Wolf as an Endangered Species.
How are we to deal with the constant demand that we “protect species” when one can’t determine what is and isn’t a species — except on the opinion of some federal regulator or activists biologist (such as the one involved in the Mexican Grey Wolf Recovery Program?
‘you can look at the entirely unauthoritative Species Problem wiki page, which states “there are at least 26 recognized species concepts.”’
I’m afraid this tells us more about Wikis than about the meaning of species. I would say, “recognized by whom”?
The word species is one that is commonly used by all English-speakers with at least the rudiments of a formal education. It is not one that biologist can redefine at their whim. The place to look for the definition, therefore, is in a dictionary of widely accepted stature, such as the Oxford, the Merriam-Webster, etc..
I did a simple Google search, since this is all that should be required, and looked at the following definitions, including Google’s own offering and that of dictionary.com. Sadly, the Oxford did not appear.
However, that short search came up with unanimity. Species is defined by ability to successfully interbreed, ie. to produce fertile offspring (as opposed to healthy but infertile progeny, such as mules).
https://encrypted.google.com/#q=species+definition
“Biology
a group of living organisms consisting of similar individuals capable of exchanging genes or interbreeding.”
http://www.dictionary.com/browse/species
“…are able to breed among themselves, but are not able to breed with members of another species. ”
http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/species
“biology : a group of animals or plants that are similar and can produce young animals or plants”
http://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/dictionary/english/species
“biology a set of animals or plants, members of which have similar characteristics to each other and which can breed with each other”
What surprised me about the original post is the news that wolves and coyotes can produce fertile hybrids. By the long recognized definition of species then, wolves and coyotes are a single species. It has recently been suggested that brown bears and polar bears are also just regional variants of a single species.
An even more intriguing possibility is suggested by at least one Sasquatch/Bigfoot account of the 19th century of which I was reminded just a day or two ago by an account of a native man in a remote region of Northern Alberta. It was of a fleeting but close-up view of a “wild man”. The 19th century account was rather more detailed, and offered a tantalizing solution to the most telling criticism of Bigfoot accounts – “how could such an elusive species find enough mates to successfully maintain its population”. The answer is – by capturing and carrying them off. Assuming, of course, that Bigfoot/Sasquatch/Yeti is, despite his hugely greater size and strength, a member of the species homo sapiens.
Of course, it is in the interests of biologists to multiply the number of species to the max. A fascinating, if frustratingly preachy and illogical, book about disappearing languages called “Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages”, by Mark Abley, recounts the 1996 discovery by biologists in the period of only one month and the space of only one kilometer of forest (I’m reading a French translation, which says ” Dans une foret intacte couvrant un territoire d’un kilometre seulement”) in the Lakekamu basin of Papua New Guinea of:
23 new species of insects
11 new species of frogs
7 new species of reptiles, and
3 new species of fish
In the same circumscribed area this team counted “more than two hundred species of ants”.
This is certainly not rocket science, but is effectively impossible to dispute…
Reply to otropogo ==> You are making a beginner’s mistake. Just because a word is listed in the dictionaries of the world, and that most dictionaries agree, and even the definitions given for a particular field, in this case Biology, seem to agree, does NOT mean that the field of study holds to or uses that definition.
There is a vast difference between “dictionary definition” and what a field of science actually uses when they are applying the concept to reality.
That’s why I have pointed to the wiki page, where one can find references to all 26 different competing concepts of what constitutes a species in the real world of applied biology.
Using the usual, casual definition (which you amply supply), there is only one species of wolf in the United States — the Gray Wolf, which is what the extensive DNA study by vanHoldt and others determined. In fact, it also means that coyotes and Gray Wolves, Red Wolves, Eastern Wolves, and most domesticated dogs are all one single species — as they all happily merrily interbreed with one another given the slightest chance, in fact, it is almost impossible to stop them from doing so.
All this is known to the very biologists who have declared the Eastern Wolf, the Red Wolf, the Gray Wolf, the domestic dog and the coyote all separate species on the basis of size, life-style factors, coloration, etc.
But that’s not according to the definition you found in the dictionaries, is it?
With plants and other forms of life, reality is even further from taxonomy.
I would suggest rather that you are making the classic “expert” mistake, of appropriating long-established words and using them to mean something quite different. Granted, the simple dictionary definition can’t possibly apply to all species of living things, since many do not reproduce sexually at all. However, in the everyday context of common mammals, and particularly when addressing the general public, the dictionary meaning must prevail, and it is the technical or “scientific” terminology which is obligated to flag/annotate its usage of the established word to avoid misunderstanding.
Your response aptly demonstrates a fundamental problem with modern “science” – the inability of its practitioners and propagandists to communicate their concepts, even to highly intelligent and literate laymen, let alone the average person.
This inability is routinely blamed on inadequate primary and secondary education in mathematics and the “hard” sciences, accompanied by much hand-wringing and shoulder shrugging. A song and dance routine that even the dimmer lights of society could be excused for dismissing as self-serving camouflage for “the emperor’s new clothes”.
It’s inevitable that, as the rift between the language of “science” (or should I say, “crypto-science”?) and the educated public grows, so will the lack of confidence in the predictions, warnings, and suggestions of professional “scientists”.
The particular issue of “species” is remarkable in that there really is no plausible explanation of the confusion from a communication point of view. As you yourself suggest, biologists have always been aware of the conflict and have simply, arrogantly, gone their own way, resolutely “preaching only to the choir”. I suggest that same element plays a significant role in far more obscure subjects, such as “string theory”.
Reply to otropogo ==> Sorry if you were offended…but reality always has the last word.
As to physics, you may already be aware of this ‘movement’: Has Physics Gotten Something Really Important Really Wrong?.
As for the Science Communication Problem, refer to Dan Kahan (with whom I do not entirely agree). Start here and follow on with this.
Remember, I wrote this essay as a simple comment on the implications of science and science-based-policy that depend on vague definitions and the trouble it can cause.