As you read this story, you will learn the following:
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Wolves and dogs don’t typically breed in the wild, largely because wolves are very territorial. But one exception was found.
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While wild dog-wolf hybrids had previously only been suspected through sightings, DNA testing has proven that an animal in Thessaloniki, Greece, is real.
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This raises questions about whether more of these hybrids may be lurking in other parts of the world, yet remain undocumented.
Some wolves look like dogs, and some dogs look suspiciously like wolves. To most people, this is just a symptom of the fact that dogs are descended from wolves, but for an animal recently discovered in the wild, its half-wolf, half-dog nature is very real.
Wolves (canine lupus) and dog (canine lupus) It is thought that the two species of dog diverged sometime between 27,000 and 40,000 years ago, and that the ancestors of domestic dogs were likely descended from long-extinct gray wolves. The two species are 99.9% genetically identical and (unlike horses and donkeys) are capable of producing fertile offspring if they interbreed, as they, like dogs, wolves, and related canids such as wild dogs and jackals, all have chromosomes that can be divided evenly into pairs.
The breeding of wolf-dog hybrids has been controversial, but is rare in the wild. Wolves only breed once a year, and even if they encounter a lost or wild dog during that time, they are very territorial and are more likely to chase or even kill it than to let it into their territory to mate. Still, fragments of dog ancestors found in more than half of the Eurasian wolf genomes suggest that hybridization have Happens on its own. Wild wolfdogs found near Thessaloniki in northern Greece are more evidence of this.
The hybrid was accidentally discovered by Greek wildlife organization Callisto when he captured a rogue wolf near Chalkidiki. While there have been claims of wolfdogs prowling Europe, they (and similar sightings in the United States and Central Asia) are mostly based solely on appearance, so any stray dog that looks like a wolf is likely to be identified as a hybrid. However, when Callisto ran DNA tests on 50 wolf samples from mainland Greece, they found that 55 percent were dogs and 45 percent were wolves.
Callisto has been tracking Greece’s wolf population, which has been booming since wolf hunting was banned in 1983 by the Berne Convention, which aims to study and protect endangered large carnivores such as wolves and bears. There are at least three wolf packs of about 31 wolves each in the Mount Parnisa mountain range outside Athens, and after recently concluding a six-year study of Greece’s wolf population, Callisto put the total number at 2,075 wolves.
This hybrid creature is not the same as Colossal’s attempt to eliminate the dire wolf – a species that hasn’t been seen on Earth in 10,000 years. The biotech company extracted DNA from ancient dire wolf samples and fused it with progenitor cells from existing gray wolves, which can differentiate into different types of tissue. Genes were edited to express every possible dire wolf trait, and the pups were born to surrogate mothers of domesticated hunting dogs.
Some believe that the emergence of wolf-dog hybrids in the wild is the result of a mix of increasing wolf numbers and the proliferation of stray dogs in Greece. It is estimated that more than 3 million stray dogs and cats roam the country’s streets, often relying on restaurant scraps for food. It’s possible that one of the dogs ended up in the wolf’s territory, mated with the wolf, and emerged unscathed, with the wolfdog being the result of that encounter.
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