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Wolves and dogs don't normally breed in the wild, largely because wolves are so territorial. But an exception has been found.
While wild dog-wolf hybrids had previously only been suspected through sightings, DNA tests proved that an individual animal in Thessaloniki, Greece, is the real deal.
This raises questions as to whether more of these hybrids could be lurking in other parts of the world, but remained undocumented.
There are wolves that look like dogs, and dogs that appear suspiciously like wolves. For most, this is just a symptom of the fact that dogs are descended from wolves, but for one animal recently found in the wild, its part-wolf part-dog nature is very real.
Wolves (canis lupus) and dogs (canis lupus familiaris) are thought to have diverged sometime between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago, and the ancestor of domestic dogs is likely a long-extinct descendant of gray wolves. The two species are 99.9% genetically identical, and (unlike horses and donkeys) are able to produce fertile offspring if they interbreed because they—along with dogs, wolves, and related canids like dingoes and jackals—have chromosomes that can be divided evenly into pairs.
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It is a case of wolves in fishermen’s clothing as several of them have been spotted pulling crab traps from waters off Canada’s west coast in what scientists say may be the first documented case of the animals using a tool.
Members of the Heiltsuk Nation, an Indigenous government in the province of British Columbia, had placed the traps to capture invasive green crabs that destroy eelgrass habitats which support marine life and decimate the clam, herring and salmon populations the tribe depends on for food.
But on their return, they found some of them had been shredded to pieces, according to a study published Monday in the journal Ecology and Evolution.
The finger of blame was initially pointed at both bears and wolves, although some suspected marine mammals might have been behind the damage because the traps were submerged in deep water near the community of Bella Bella at all times.
A team of researchers led by Kyle Artelle, a professor at the SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in Syracuse, New York, and Paul Paquet, an adjunct professor at Canada's University of Victoria, set out to solve the mystery.
Within a day, they caught their culprit…