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.
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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.
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Back in the mid 1970’s I had a record album entitled “The Language And Music Of Wolves”. Side A is narrated by the actor Robert Redford, who describes wolf pack behavior and explains the various vocalizations of pups, young wolves, Alpha and Beta males and females and differnt sings of packs. Side B of the album was 22 or so minutes of these vocals and sings without narration or comment.
As a college student living just of campus in a very small bungalow apartment surrounded by larger apartment buildings, I would, on some warm nights, open the windows and put the Side B on the stereo at a low volume. Cats left the entire city block; dogs in apartments tried to join the sings. I stopped doing this prank after hearing a neighboring dog owner beating his small dog for howling along with the pack late one night.
The breeds of dogs responded to the sings of the specie of wolves. Canidae is as Canidae does.
@Kip Hansen
August 2, 2016 at 1:50 pm
“Reply to otropogo ==> Sorry if you were offended…but reality always has the last word.”
Ah, I’m sorry, I hadn’t realized your “beginner’s mistake” comment was meant to offend. But now that I think of it, I get it.
“As to physics, you may already be aware of this ‘movement’: Has Physics Gotten Something Really Important Really Wrong?.”
No, I wasn’t aware of it. But having read the linked page, I feel not a whit the wiser…
“As for the Science Communication Problem, refer to Dan Kahan (with whom I do not entirely agree). Start here and follow on with this.”
Now it’s time for me to call YOU a beginner in communication, as are the other writers you cite. What you fail to understand is:
1. there is NO SCIENCE of COMMUNICATION,
and that without such science, there can never be communication of science.
2. the designation “science” and “scientist” is as lacking in objective criteria as the designation of sainthood by the Catholic Church.
The two brief quotes below from your first link above (the second didn’t real add anything)
“You’re much more likely to believe science when …science communicators (and, let’s face it, any scientist who wants to communicate effectively) need to treat their communications interventions scientifically….”
Show just how oblivious “scientists” are to their intellectual isolation. What is not obvious from these two pages your recommend is the promiscuous collegiality of “scientists”, who blindly accept the “established” “science” of areas of inquiry that are beyond their expertise.
And sadly, as suggested by the first of the two phrases above “You’re much more likely to believe science when…” (do GET that? “believe”, not “understand”, not “agree with”…), educated and influential laymen, extend the same collegiality to “scientists” just as indiscriminately. After all, they are part of the ruling elite of our society.
Consider a small, but very compelling example of how easily this happens, and the very real damage it can do.
In 1990, James Driskell was charged with murder in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. The only physical evidence was three hairs found in his car. These hairs were identified as belonging to the murder victim by a method developed by a forensic “scientist” working in an RCMP lab, and widely adopted by police forces throughout North America and also in Europe. And the accused apparently sealed his own fate by insisting that the dead man had never been inside the vehicle.
Neither the police, the prosecution, the judge, nor even the defense lawyer, questioned the validity of the test.
James Driskell was convicted and spent 13 years in prison for a crime he hadn’t committed. He was only saved after 13 years because of a skeptical US lawyer who decided to look into the theoretical basis of the lab analysis, and found that there had never been any peer review nor any replication of the research that supposedly went into this widely accepted and used evidential tool.
As a result of this work, the three hairs that had “proven” that Driskell was lying (and thus presumably guilty of murder) were re-tested using newer (and better scrutinized) techniques, and it was discovered that not only were NONE of the three hairs the murdered man’s, they were from three different individuals.
As a result, hundreds of convictions in Canada and the US were reviewed, and many found to have been unjustified. Unfortunately, some of the convicted had already been executed. Evidently, it is not only Canadian forensic “experts”, police, lawyers, and judges who are unable to recognize junk “science” as such.
James Driskell was awarded $4 million in reparation for his 13 years of prison, and the jailhouse snitch, Ray Zanidean , who testified that Driskell had confessed to the murder privately was “outed” as having been paid $50,000 by police and let off on a pending arson charge in return for his perjury.
Ray Zanidean was due to testify at a follow-up inquiry, but died suddenly and unexpectedly before he could do so, although apparently hearty and healthy, and enjoying his newly purchased gas station franchise.