19 Facts About Eastern wolf

Eastern wolf known as the timber wolf, Algonquin wolf or eastern timber wolf, is a canine of debated taxonomy native to the Great Lakes region and southeastern Canada.

In Canada, the eastern wolf is listed as Canis lupus lycaon under the Species At Risk Act 2002, Schedule 1 - List of Wildlife at Risk.

The main threat to this wolf is human hunting and trapping outside of the protected areas, which leads to genetic introgression with the eastern coyote due to a lack of mates.

The distribution of coyote genotypes within wolves matched the phenotypic differences between these wolves found in an earlier study, with the larger Great Lakes wolf found in Minnesota, the smaller Algonquin type found in central Ontario, and the smallest and more coyote-like tweed wolf or eastern coyote type occupying sections of southeastern Ontario and southern Quebec.

In 2009, a study of eastern Canadian wolves – which was referred to as the "Great Lakes" wolf in this study – using microsatellites, mDNA, and the paternally-inherited yDNA markers found that the eastern Canadian wolf was a unique ecotype of the gray wolf that had undergone recent hybridization with other gray wolves and coyotes.

Related searches

The study could not dismiss the possibility of the eastern wolf having evolved from an ancient hybridization of gray wolf and coyote in the Late Pleistocene or Early Holocene.

The unexpected finding was that the one Great Lakes Eastern wolf specimen included in this study showed a high degree of genetic divergence.

Previous studies propose the Great Lakes Eastern wolf to be an ancient ecotype of the gray Eastern wolf that had experienced genetic introgression from other types of gray wolves and coyotes.

Individuals within each group showed consistent levels of coyote to Eastern wolf inheritance, indicating that this was the result of relatively ancient admixture.

The eastern wolf as found in Algonquin Provincial Park is genetically closely related to the Great Lakes wolf as found in Minnesota and Isle Royale National Park in Michigan.

The Mexican Eastern wolf is the most ancestral of the gray wolves that live in North America today.

Charles Darwin was told that there were two types of Eastern wolf living in the Catskill Mountains, one being a lightly-built, greyhound-like animal that pursued deer, and the other being a bulkier, shorter-legged Eastern wolf.

Past range of the eastern wolf included southern Quebec, most of Ontario, the Great Lakes states, New York State and New England.

Today, the Great Lakes wolf is generally found in the northern halves of Minnesota and Wisconsin, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, southeastern Manitoba and northern Ontario, and the Algonquin wolf inhabits central and eastern Ontario as well as southwestern Quebec north of the St Lawrence River.

In 1942 it was believed that, before European settlement, the wolf had ranged throughout the wooded and open areas of eastern North America from what is southern Quebec westward to the Great Plains and towards the Southeastern Woodlands.

Eastern wolf numbers declined noticeably shortly before and after the American Revolution, particularly in Connecticut, where the wolf bounty was repealed in 1774.

Eastern wolf numbers were still high enough to cause concern in the more sparsely populated areas of southern New Hampshire and Maine, with wolf hunting becoming a regular occupation among settlers and natives alike.

The most serious case occurred in 1998 when a male Eastern wolf that had been long noted to be unafraid of humans stalked a couple walking their four-year-old daughter in September that year, losing interest when the family took refuge in a trailer.

Two days later, the Eastern wolf attacked a 19-month-old boy, causing several puncture wounds on his chest and back before being driven off by campers.