Red wolf and coyotes are an interesting conundrum when it comes to thinking of hybrids as ‘good or bad’. Thought to be a product of hybridisation between coyotes and grey wolves, red wolves have a lot of cultural significance in the southeastern United States. Native ranges of captive breeding programmes have worked at trying to re-introduce and establish red wolf populations in their historic ranges.

Yet these wolves have started having hybrid offspring with coyotes. This isn’t ideal, but because the red wolf population is so small, there isn’t a lot of genetic diversity among current red wolves. What if some ‘new’ genetic diversity can be found in wolf-coyote hybrids? There is a population of coyotes-not-coyotes in Galveston, Texas that have red wolf DNA – DNA that isn’t found in current red wolves! This ‘ghost’ DNA could be exactly what the doctor ordered when it comes to injecting some diversity back into the wolf population.

So if we were to breed (hybridise) the Galveston coyotes with red wolves we’d be introducing genetic diversity back into the population (yay!) but then also be making more hybrids, which… goes against what we would want – right? This is quite the tricky situation and has caused some head scratching when it comes to how best to approach this situation and really goes to show that we can’t be too black and white in our thinking.

The original research can be found here: Rediscovery of Red Wolf Ghost Alleles in a Canid Population Along the American Gulf Coast

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Tanya Strydom is a PhD student at the Université de Montréal, mostly focusing on how we can use machine learning and artificial intelligence in ecology. Current research interests include (but are not limited to) predicting ecological networks, the role species traits and scale in ecological networks, general computer (and maths) geekiness, and a (seemingly) ever growing list of side projects. Tweets (sometimes related to actual science) can be found @TanyaS_08.