Origin and status of the Great Lakes wolf

Abstract

An extensive debate concerning the origin and taxonomic status of wolf-like canids in the North American Great Lakes region and the consequences for conservation politics regarding these enigmatic predators is ongoing. Using maternally, paternally and biparentally inherited molecular markers, we demonstrate that the Great Lakes wolves are a unique population or ecotype of gray wolves. Furthermore, we show that the Great Lakes wolves experienced high degrees of ancient and recent introgression of coyote and western gray wolf mtDNA and Y-chromosome haplotypes, and that the recent demographic bottleneck caused by persecution and habitat depletion in the early 1900s is not reflected in the genetic data.

Impact of Quaternary climatic changes and interspecific competition on the demographic history of a highly mobile generalist carnivore, the coyote

“…A similar pattern has been reported on a continental scale in the closely related gray wolf [13]. On small geographic scales, habitat-associated population partitions have been observed both in coyotes [22] and gray wolves [9,23,24]. Population declines might be difficult to infer based solely on contemporary samples, and BSP patterns might be indistinguishable from constant population size through time.…”

“…To test for signals of population expansion, we calculated a mismatch distribution and conducted two neutrality tests (Tajima's D, Fu's Fs). We excluded samples from the most recently (last century) colonized eastern North America because recurrent gene flow between the invading coyotes and resident eastern wolves [9][10][11] might bias demographic inferences. Past population size trajectories were inferred using a Bayesian coalescent (Bayesian Skyline Plot, BSP [3]) approach as implemented in BEAST v. 1.5.4 [12].…”

A genome-wide perspective on the evolutionary history of enigmatic wolf-like canids

“…4; Supplemental Fig. S5; Carmichael et al 2007;Musiani et al 2007;Koblmüller et al 2009;Muñoz-Fuentes et al 2009). These results highlight the importance of using genome-wide surveys to better define and evaluate genetic units for conservation, and further support the notion that in high mobile carnivores, ecology may have an important role in restricting gene flow among populations.…”

“…In the New World, Mexican wolves are most basal, followed by British Columbian coastal forest wolves, then the Northern Quebec Atlantic forest and tundra/taiga wolves, and finally a mixed grouping of boreal and Rocky Mountain forests wolves. These locality and habitat associations largely support ecotype designations based on previous microsatellite analyses (Carmichael et al 2007;Musiani et al 2007;Koblmüller et al 2009;Muñoz-Fuentes et al 2009). However, in North American wolves, bootstrap support for boreal forest and Rocky Mountain forest groupings is low, and define a somewhat mixed cluster (Supplemental Fig.…”

“…Moreover, assignments are more variable in Great Lakes wolves, ranging from about 50% to 100% gray wolf ancestry (Fig. 4), suggesting a more heterogeneous process of admixture, with some individuals largely free of coyote ancestry, especially in more western populations (Koblmüller et al 2009;Rutledge et al 2010a). Notably, the distinctive wolves of Algonquin Provincial Park in central Ontario that have the archetypical C1 mtDNA haplotype thought to be representative of the Great Lakes wolf taxon (Wilson et al 2000;Kyle et al 2006) have the largest proportion of their genome assigned to coyotes.…”