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January 31, 2011
Add Gray Wolf to List of Canines in Africa
By SINDYA N. BHANOO
The Ethiopian highlands are home to two canine species that look deceptively similar, the gray wolf and the golden jackal, according to a new study in the journal PLoS One. Until now, the two midsize animals were thought to be the same species.
In the 1880s, the English biologist Thomas Huxley suspected that there was a wolf living in the region but had no way of investigating it at the time.
“This shows the progress of using modern genetic techniques for understanding ecology,” said Nils Stenseth, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oslo and one of the study’s authors.
He and his colleagues, from the University of Oxford in England and Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, analyzed feces samples and compared their information with data stored in GenBank, a collection of all publicly available DNA sequences maintained by the National Institutes of Health.
“We were really surprised to see that it was wolf DNA, and first off we assumed we had something wrong,” Dr. Stenseth said.
The wolf is cryptic and difficult to spot. The researchers do not even have a clear photograph of the animal yet. Because so little known about the ecology of the species, it will take further study to grasp what the wolf’s living situation is today.
“What we want now is to go in and do a much more detailed evaluation of the wolf population,” which may be endangered, Dr. Stenseth said.
“It’s very clear that it’s a small population, because there are many biologists working in the area, and by now it would have otherwise been a known species,” he said.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 1, 2011
In an earlier version of this article, a caption misidentified the canine in the photo. It is the Simien jackal, also known as the Ethiopian wolf; it is not a type of gray wolf.
Add Gray Wolf to List of Canines in Africa
By SINDYA N. BHANOO
The Ethiopian highlands are home to two canine species that look deceptively similar, the gray wolf and the golden jackal, according to a new study in the journal PLoS One. Until now, the two midsize animals were thought to be the same species.
In the 1880s, the English biologist Thomas Huxley suspected that there was a wolf living in the region but had no way of investigating it at the time.
“This shows the progress of using modern genetic techniques for understanding ecology,” said Nils Stenseth, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Oslo and one of the study’s authors.
He and his colleagues, from the University of Oxford in England and Addis Ababa University in Ethiopia, analyzed feces samples and compared their information with data stored in GenBank, a collection of all publicly available DNA sequences maintained by the National Institutes of Health.
“We were really surprised to see that it was wolf DNA, and first off we assumed we had something wrong,” Dr. Stenseth said.
The wolf is cryptic and difficult to spot. The researchers do not even have a clear photograph of the animal yet. Because so little known about the ecology of the species, it will take further study to grasp what the wolf’s living situation is today.
“What we want now is to go in and do a much more detailed evaluation of the wolf population,” which may be endangered, Dr. Stenseth said.
“It’s very clear that it’s a small population, because there are many biologists working in the area, and by now it would have otherwise been a known species,” he said.
This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:
Correction: February 1, 2011
In an earlier version of this article, a caption misidentified the canine in the photo. It is the Simien jackal, also known as the Ethiopian wolf; it is not a type of gray wolf.