![]() The highly contagious and often lethal virus, which mutated from human measles brought by Europeans to North America, attacks the respiratory and digestive tracts of canines and can damage their brains and spinal cords, often causing lifelong difficulties with movement and coordination in those that survive.Īs highly social pack animals who regularly share food and saliva, wolves are very good at spreading the virus, Cubaynes says. The darker coloring has its drawbacks, including the loss of camouflage and lower fertility, so the fact that black wolves became prevalent in the population indicated to researchers that the color has been selected for.Īlthough it wasn’t totally clear why that was, Sarah Cubaynes, a population ecologist at the Center for Functional and Evolutionary Ecology in France, and her colleagues suspected it had something to do with the emergence of canine distemper virus (CDV) in the 1700s. In 2009, researchers from Stanford University found that the mutation that causes the black coloring, also known as melanism, first sprung up in North American wolves between 1,500 and 7,000 years ago as a result of hybridization between wolves and dogs. But in North America, especially in Yellowstone National Park where a large amount of wolf research is conducted, black wolves are relatively common, making up as much as half of wolf populations. “That is all easy to say, but this study really puts data behind the ideas and makes useful predictions,” he writes in an email to The Scientist.įor most animal biologists, seeing an all-black variant of their studied species would be a once-in-a-lifetime experience. University of Minnesota ecologist Joseph Bump, who also did not participate in the research, also praised the study. “It really is a fascinating story of evolutionary ecology,” says Adam Boyko, a canine geneticist at Cornell University who wasn’t involved in the work, applauding the study’s exploration of pathogens and evolution. According to a study published today (October 20) in Science, the tendency of black wolves to mate with gray ones and vice versa is critical to the populations’ stability. ![]() And as it turns out, the mutation that gives the animals black coats also makes them more likely to survive an infection of canine distemper virus. Despite the common name “gray wolf,” North American wolves ( Canis lupus) actually vary in coloration, with two primary fur colors: gray and black. In the face of a deadly disease, the color of your coat could be the difference between life and death-at least if you’re a wolf. ABOVE: Wolves from the Druid Pack trot across the Lamar Valley in Yellowstone National Park.
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