Red Wolves Threatened by New Plan to Allow Hunting

The red wolf, which once roamed all the
way from Texas to New York, has dwindled to a wild population of
around 35, found only in one peninsula in eastern North Carolina.
On Wednesday, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposed allowing
landowners to legally kill those wolves once they leave the
confines of a small protected area known as Alligator River National
Wildlife Refuge^[1].

Hundreds of years of trapping and hunting
red wolves in the Eastern U.S. winnowed them down until they were
declared extinct in the wild in 1980. Seven years later, a few
animals were released as an experimental resettlement program in
the Alligator River refuge, near where the Wright brothers tested
their first airplanes.

It was slow-going, and local hunters and
landowners would occasionally shoot a wolf. Many locals don’t favor
their reintroduction, and from a distance they closely resemble
coyotes, which are commonly hunted. Meanwhile coyotes would breed
with red wolves, creating hybrids that watered down the gene
pool.

By the early part of this century there
were perhaps 150 red wolves in the wild, more than half of what the
wildlife service calculated would be necessary for a sustainable
population. Many have cited the success of red wolf reintroduction
as inspiration for creating programs for gray wolves in Wyoming and
Arizona. The increase in the population was credited to efforts
such as coyote sterilization and legal deterrents—killing a red
wolf can lead to a $100,000 fine and up to a year in prison, though
it’s rarely enforced.

“The restoration of the red wolf is the
first success story for restoration of wolves in North America,”
says Chamberlain^[2], who has studied them
for more than a decade. “And it’s a crying shame, on many fronts,
that it’s come to where we are today.”

Sometime around 2006, wolf numbers that had been on the rise
numbers began to decline. The mortality rate quadrupled from the
decade before, and locals started to complain the animals were
hurting deer populations on private land. After a series of
lawsuits, the Fish and Wildlife Service stopped sterilizing coyotes
and introducing red wolf pups into wild dens outside of the
national refuge. They also began issuing limited “take” permits to
landowners who wanted to shoot coyotes or wolves on their land.

Such permits were allowed because technically, red wolves
weren’t classified the same as a typical endangered species, since
they were reintroduced and viewed as an “experimental” population.
Fish and Wildlife says that almost 500 applications were made for
permits, but just two were granted and only one ended in a dead
wolf, a lactating female.

The wild population of wolves, which numbers 35 at most, roams a
sparsely populated area the size of Delaware, though some
individuals roam much farther. If the proposed changes go ahead,
the range would effectively shrink to about the size of Chicago.
(There are another 200 wolves in captivity.)

Only about a dozen of the animals live in Alligator River
refuge, and the service plans to intensively manage this population
to retain their genetic diversity and wild behaviors. The two dozen
or so wolves outside this area would lose their legal protections
and could be legally shot. The agency says it hopes to introduce
the wolves elsewhere, but hasn’t specified where.

Is It OK to Let These Wolves
Go Extinct in the Wild? March 18,
2015 – The only remaining population of
wild red wolves in the world live in North Carolina.
A debate over the viability of their survival, and the cost to
private landowners, has led the North Carolina Wildlife Resources
Commission to question whether or not to declare the
species  extinct in the wild and bring all
remaining wolves into captivity

“We are going back to what we had in 1986—the lands that we have
full control of. Because right now we have no access to any private
land,” says Leopoldo Miranda, the assistant regional director for
ecological services for the Fish and Wildlife Service. “We are
regrouping and trying to gain control over the population within
the lands that we actually control.”

The move has prompted fierce backlash. “If you can’t succeed in
North Carolina, what makes them think they are going to succeed
elsewhere?” says Joseph Hinton^[3], a researcher at the
University of Georgia who has worked alongside Chamberlain. “You
think this animal is going to do any better in east Texas,
Mississippi, Georgia, Alabama?”

Hinton says Fish and Wildlife buckled under political pressure,
which sets a bad precedent. Miranda counters that you can’t do
management without the cooperation of the locals. Both agree that
the region has experienced a recent shift toward private property
rights and mistrust of the federal government that had nothing to
do with wolves.

Dan Ashe, president and CEO of the Association of Zoos and
Aquariums—and former head of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife
Service—expressed displeasure with the move, saying in a statement
that the service “is stepping back from the wild population of red
wolf.” But Ashe says his organization is “prepared to step up and
continue to maintain a healthy, genetically viable population in
human care.”

A public comment period for the proposed rule started yesterday,
and runs until the end of July. If the rule goes through, it would
take effect in November.

Of course, one concern for any population in such dire straits
is genetic health. Red wolves are already highly inbred and their
genetic diversity is on par with a population raised from just five
animals (though the actual founding population was 14 animals). But
shallow gene pools don’t necessarily spell doom for a species. Some
have evolved mechanisms to recover from very low populations.

For example, Mexican wolves—a subspecies of gray wolves that
once lived in Mexico and the American Southwest—bounced back after
declining to a population of only seven individuals, without
causing an outbreak of genetic disease.

Similarly, red wolves
don’t seem to suffer from genetic diseases^[4]
and theoretically could seed other populations. The difference is
Mexican wolves don’t have hybridization problems. Red wolves
readily breed with the coyotes that have poured into their former
range. In fact, some have even argued that red wolves are nothing
but a coyote/gray wolf hybrid, a hotly debated argument.

“This uncertainty about the genetic ancestry—is it a hybrid, is
it not, how old is this species—has led to policy challenges and
given groups who don’t want to protect the species more
ammunition,” says Lisette Waits^[5], a geneticist at the
University of Idaho who has studied the red wolf genome.

Whether because of politics or hunters or hybridization, the
dream of a stable wild population hasn’t been realized, and their
future looks grim. While the gray wolves that are thriving in
Wyoming owe some of their success to the red wolf, it’s small
comfort to those who have dedicated themselves to their
recovery.

“The notion that they are just going to [sustainably] keep a
population of wolves on the refuge in perpetuity is ludicrous,”
says Chamberlain.