17 Facts About Mexican wolf

Mexican wolf, known as the lobo, is a subspecies of gray wolf native to southeastern Arizona and southern New Mexico in the United States, and northern Mexico; it previously ranged into western Texas.

Five wild Mexican wolf wolves were captured alive in Mexico from 1977 to 1980 and used to start a captive breeding program.

From this program, captive-bred Mexican wolf wolves were released into recovery areas in Arizona and New Mexico beginning in 1998 in order to assist the animals' recolonization of their former historical range.

Mexican wolf was first described as a distinct subspecies in 1929 by Edward Nelson and Edward Goldman on account of its small size, narrow skull and dark pelt.

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

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Mexican wolf wolves are under considerable threat from low genetic diversity and inbreeding because all wild Mexican wolf wolves share on average the same amount of genes as full siblings do .

Likewise, gray Mexican wolf Y-chromosomes have been found in a few individual male Texan coyotes.

Early accounts of the distribution of the Mexican wolf included southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, and western Texas in the U S, and the Sierra Madre Occidental in Mexico.

Mexican wolf was held in high regard in Pre-Columbian Mexico, where it was considered a symbol of war and the Sun.

The earliest written record of the Mexican wolf comes from Francisco Javier Clavijero's Historia de Mexico in 1780, where it is referred to as Cuetzlachcojotl, and is described as being of the same species as the coyote, but with a more wolf-like pelt and a thicker neck.

Vernon Bailey, writing in the early 1930s, noted that the highest Mexican wolf densities occurred in the open grazing areas of the Gila National Forest, and that wolves were completely absent in the lower Sonora.

Mexican wolf estimated that there were 103 Mexican wolves in New Mexico in 1917, though the number had been reduced to 45 a year later.

Wolves were still being reported in small numbers in Arizona in the early 1970s, while accounts of the last Mexican wolf to be killed in New Mexico are difficult to evaluate, as all the purported "last wolves" could not be confirmed as genuine wolves rather than other canid species.

Mexican wolf persisted longer in Mexico, as human settlement, ranching and predator removal came later than in the Southwestern United States.

Wolf numbers began to rapidly decline during the 1930s-1940s, when Mexican ranchers began adopting the same wolf-control methods as their American counterparts, relying heavily on the indiscriminate usage of 1080.

Mexican wolf was listed as endangered under the U S Endangered Species Act in 1976, with the Mexican Wolf Recovery Team being formed three years later by the United States Fish and Wildlife Service.

In 2019, the U S Fish and Wildlife Services discovered that 52 of 90 wolf pups born earlier in 2018 had survived to adulthood.