Ontario Yote and grey wolf cross

Highwind

Highwind

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I was speaking with a retired MNR employee and he suggested that there has been some cross breeding between Coyotes and the Grey Wolf in parts of Ontario. I've seen a few larger then normal Coyotes, so I wasn't too surprised to hear that.
 
Highwind said:
I was speaking with a retired MNR employee and he suggested that there has been some cross breeding between Coyotes and the Grey Wolf in parts of Ontario. I've seen a few larger then normal Coyotes, so I wasn't too surprised to hear that.
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been happening for years. there was a thread similar to this just a little while ago. they call them tweed wolves where i live(near Tweed Ontario). hybrids, brush wolves, tweed wolves, call them what you will but there's lot's of them.
 
I had a Nippissing University Proffesor collect Wolf DNA from my farm in Callander, near North Bay. Our concern was increasing size and weight of Coyotes. Turned out DNA included Grey wolf (Timber Wolf) Red Wolf, Coyote, and Domestic Dog.He stated this was quite normal in this area, and to a degree elsewhere.
 
I think the Tiberwolves around here have been abducting the local domestic dogs for breeding purposes.
The local dogs must like it cus they never come home.
 
G P said:
All the coyotes in NL are desended from these Ontario coywolves.
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Not Ontario specifically, but rather from the general northeasterly expansion of the coyote's range throughout North America, and where they met up with wolves (red and grey/eastern). They don't really pay much attention to borders. ;)

blasted_saber said:
True grey wolves and coyotes are NOT capable of cross breeding. Where the genes get muddled is the inclusion of eastern wolves, which can breed successfully with either of them.
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Got some authority for that? I haven't seen anything to suggest that there is a biological obstacle. Eastern wolves are simply a subspecies of grey, after all. Certainly it doesn't happen as often, for a number of reasons, including geography, size, territoriality, availability of mates and prey, etc.
 
CV32 said:
Not Ontario specifically, but rather from the general northeasterly expansion of the coyote's range throughout North America, and where they met up with wolves (red and grey/eastern). They don't really pay much attention to borders. ;)



Got some authority for that? I haven't seen anything to suggest that there is a biological obstacle. Eastern wolves are simply a subspecies of grey, after all. Certainly it doesn't happen as often, for a number of reasons, including geography, size, territoriality, availability of mates and prey, etc.
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One paper on the subject

http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/content/100/suppl_1/S80.full

T
he genetic data are consistent with the hypothesis that the Tweed wolf as described by Kolenosky and Standfield (1975) and Schmitz and Kolenosky (1985) is a hybrid between the Algonquin type wolf and the coyote. However, in contrast to Kolenosky and Standfield, recent genetic evidence (Wilson et al. 2000) suggests that these hybrids originated from interbreeding between 2 North American evolved Canis species, C. lycaon, representing the eastern timber wolf and red wolf, and the coyote, C. latrans. The absence of the gray wolf in this hybridization event explains the anomaly of the lack of interbreeding between western coyotes and gray wolves (Roy et al. 1994; Wilson et al. 2000). As Schmitz and Kolenosky (1985) alluded to, the absence of a “pure” coyote in southern Ontario is apparent immediately south of Algonquin Park and into the Frontenac Axis. This hybrid represents the Ontario distribution of the eastern coyote (Moore and Parker 1992) that is extremely adaptable to both agricultural and low-density forested habitats. Despite the high numbers of the Tweed wolves, southeast of Algonquin Park, the RST data (Table 5) support the proposition that barriers to gene flow exist by maintaining larger wolflike animals within the Park. Despite relatively less gene flow from the Frontenac Axis, the high level of genetic variation in Algonquin Park (Table 2) is supported by the gene flow from the Magnetawan region, northeastern Ontario, and Quebec (Grewal et al. 2004). Although the Algonquin Park population numbers less than 200, evidence suggests that it is part of a larger metapopulation that includes animals from northeastern and northwestern Ontario and Quebec (Grewal et al. 2004; Kyle et al. 2006).
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blasted_saber said:
One paper on the subject

http://jhered.oxfordjournals.org/content/100/suppl_1/S80.full
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Thanks. That's a useful source which reinforces what I was saying about the barriers to "gene flow" (to borrow a term from the paper), but I didn't find any statement in there that says coupling between a grey wolf and a coyote was impossible. I would be surprised to learn of a biological barrier to mating between canids that are so closely related.

Here's another comment on the subject:

In eastern Canada, an area invaded b coyotes in the last 100 years, several genotypes identical or very similar to those found in coyotes were discovered in individuals phenotypically identified as gray wolves14 (genotypes with asterisks in Fig. 5). Wolves with these "coyote" genotypes increased in frequency toward the east, from 50% in Minnesota to 100% in Quebec (Fig. 6). The hypothesis advanced to explain this pattern was that coyotes and wolves had hybridized in areas of eastern Canada where wolves were rare and coyotes common. The interspecific transfer of mtDNA was asymmetric; none of the coyotes sampled had wolf-like genotypes although coyote genotypes were common in gray wolves. Because mtDNA is maternally inherited without recombination, this result reflects a mating asymmetry: male wolves mate with female coyotes, and their offspring backcross to wolves. Either the reverse cross is rare, or the offspring of such backcrosses to coyotes do not reproduce. This mating asymmetry may indicate that the smaller male coyotes cannot inspire the larger female gray wolves to mate with them.
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[emphasis mine]

In fact, the red wolf is postulated as originally being a product of the grey wolf and the coyote:

Conceivably, hybridization between gray wolves and coyotes alone could explain the intermediate morphology of red wolves. To test this hypothesis, DNA was isolated from six museum skins of red wolves obtained from Five states in about 1910, a time before hybridization of red wolves and coyotes was thought to be common. Phylogenetic analysis of 398 bp of the cytochrome b gene showed that red wolves at that time did not have a distinct genotype; all six had genotypes classified with gray wolves or coyotes, a result consistent with a hybrid origin for the species15 (Fig. 4).
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Eh sometimes if she's ugly or outside of your race you'd still take her home for the night no?? lol yea I've heard of them cross breeding, even in Hamilton ont. I will be hunting them just after deer season maybe i'll get to see one first hand.
 
I seen one long legged "grey" coyote today that I thought was a deer. He was walking in about 10" of fresh snow and he still looked long legged. Sure enough soon as I stopped the truck to get a better look with the binos, He stopped, Sat down on his ass 200 yards from the road and watched me. He knew I didn't have the gun. I have permission to hunt this property, I even went home and got the gun and went back only to find him GONE.

Could be a hybrid, This coyote had to be 50lbs+. Had the typical skinny long nosed coyote head, But huge body and long legs
 
blasted_saber said:
True grey wolves and coyotes are NOT capable of cross breeding. Where the genes get muddled is the inclusion of eastern wolves, which can breed successfully with either of them.
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Grey wolves are eastern wolves which are timber wolves. They can breed with coyote and dog. Domestic dogs are descendants from Grey wolves
 
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