In honor of Halloween, we're bringing you a Short Wave ghost story — featuring an animal that has long been the stuff of conservationist legend: the American red wolf.
This small, cinnamon-colored canid roamed free across the American Southeast, preying on deer and small mammals and occupying a key spot in Gulf Coast ecosystems. But early European settlers saw wolves as their enemies – predators that competed with human hunters for game, and that threatened farmers' livestock and livelihoods.
Federal programs offered bounties to trap, hunt and kill wolves, further incentivizing their extermination. And as the number of people spreading across the continent went up, the number of red wolves went down.
"So by the mid 1900s, red wolves had been pretty effectively eliminated from the landscape on a very rapid decline," says Bridgett vonHoldt, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University. "And that's when there was an outcry for people to say, we actually need to save this species before it goes extinct."
Early American conservationists knew something had to be done. So in the 70s, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services hired contractors and rounded up as many canids as they could.
"They trapped everything from coyotes, to dogs, to red wolves, and hybrids in between all of those options," Bridgett says. From those hundreds of canids, FWS bred 40 with the most red wolf-like traits, before ultimately creating a founder population of 14 red wolves.
Those 14 wolves are the ancestors of every American red wolf in captivity today. At present, there are only a few hundred red wolves in captive breeding programs; a handful of them roam wild on the Albemarle peninsula in North Carolina.
But with such a small founder population, genetic diversity is limited. That's where Bridgett's work comes in.
In this episode, Short Wave host Emily Kwong interviews Bridgett about the bold new plan to recover the lost diversity of the American red wolf, using something called "ghost genetics". They discuss gene dictionaries, the possibilities of poo, and how a photo of a common Texas coyote... started it all.
Have another animal you want us to dig into for a future episode? Email us at shortwave@npr.org!
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This episode was produced by Hannah Chinn and edited by our showrunner, Rebecca Ramirez. It was fact-checked by Tyler Jones. Robert Rodriguez was the audio engineer.
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