Home Forums Hunting & Shooting Canada Big Coyote, really big.

Red wolves have been hypothesized to be a "hybrid swarm" consisting of genetics from coyotes, gray wolves and domestic dogs. Biometric analyses seem to bear this out, but I have not run across any DNA results. Surely, there must be some at this point in time.

The original isolating mechanism that kept wolves and coyotes from interbreeding frequently was the fact that female coyotes and female wolves came into heat at different times, and the dynamics of pack affiliation and interspecific territoriality limited opportunities for cross-breeding.

Introduce the domestic dog into the equation (females may be receptive at any time during the year), and you get hybrids with both coyotes and gray wolves. The original range of the red wolf was habitat that was marginal for gray wolves, although the bison herds on the coastal prairies of Texas did provide a prey source that permitted a population to live there.

Native Americans had domestic dogs that were undoubtedly descended from wolves in Asia, but they were almost totally dependent on humans for their sustenance. The ones that went feral probably didn't last long, and if they did and bred with wolves or coyotes, it seems unlikely that the young would have survived. Without the help of the pack, it's almost impossible for the alpha female in a pack of coyotes or wolves to provide for a litter of pups.

These days, we are back in a situation where all three species are thrown together in a situation in which the ability to hunt and kill wild prey is not that important to survival. With the reintroduction of gray wolves back into the U.S., I am sure that there are a lot of hybrid swarms developing throughout North America.

One final note: throughout the 18th and 19th century, a variety of ecotypes (populations of a species that were adapted to a particular habitat type) were described as subspecies (and sometimes even as separate species). These descriptions were based on variations in physical characteristics that probably were simply points in a continuum of varying physical characteristics across the entire range of a "species". DNA analyses are beginning to sort some of this out, but there is a lot yet to be discovered.