Abstract
The recent discovery of a lineage of gray wolf in North-East Africa suggests the presence of a cryptic canid on the continent, the African wolf Canis lupus lupaster. We analyzed the mtDNA diversity (cytochrome b and control region) of a series of African Canis including wolf-like animals from North and West Africa. Our objectives were to assess the actual range of C. l. lupaster, to further estimate the genetic characteristics and demographic history of its lineage, and to question its taxonomic delineation from the golden jackal C. aureus, with which it has been considered synonymous. We confirmed the existence of four distinct lineages within the gray wolf, including C. lupus/familiaris (Holarctic wolves and dogs), C. l. pallipes, C. l. chanco and C. l. lupaster. Taxonomic assignment procedures identified wolf-like individuals from Algeria, Mali and Senegal, as belonging to C. l. lupaster, expanding its known distribution c. 6,000 km to the west. We estimated that the African wolf lineage (i) had the highest level of genetic diversity within C. lupus, (ii) coalesced during the Late Pleistocene, contemporaneously with Holarctic wolves and dogs, and (iii) had an effective population size of c. 80,000 females. Our results suggest that the African wolf is a relatively ancient gray wolf lineage with a fairly large, past effective population size, as also suggested by the Pleistocene fossil record. Unique field observations in Senegal allowed us to provide a morphological and behavioral diagnosis of the African wolf that clearly distinguished it from the sympatric golden jackal. However, the detection of C. l. lupaster mtDNA haplotypes in C. aureus from Senegal brings the delineation between the African wolf and the golden jackal into question. In terms of conservation, it appears urgent to further characterize the status of the African wolf with regard to the African golden jackal.
Highlights
The gray wolf (Canis lupus Linnaeus, 1758) is one of the most emblematic, extant mammalian species: once the most widely distributed mammal–encompassing a Holarctic and Indian subcontinent distribution [1], it was domesticated to become ‘‘Man’s best friend’’, the dog [2]
It has long been emphasized that the so-called Egyptian jackal C. aureus lupaster Hemprich & Ehrenberg, 1832, distributed in North Africa, had cranial and dental sizes that overlapped with the smaller-sized wolves from Arabia and India, but clearly separated from the even smaller golden jackal [9,10,11,12]
The level of confidence in the assignment varied using either cytochrome b (CYTB) or control region (CR) fragments, the highest match (95– 99%) was always found with the C. l. lupaster sequences registered in Genbank
Summary
The gray wolf (Canis lupus Linnaeus, 1758) is one of the most emblematic, extant mammalian species: once the most widely distributed mammal–encompassing a Holarctic and Indian subcontinent distribution [1], it was domesticated to become ‘‘Man’s best friend’’, the dog [2]. It has long been emphasized that the so-called Egyptian jackal C. aureus lupaster Hemprich & Ehrenberg, 1832, distributed in North Africa, had cranial and dental sizes that overlapped with the smaller-sized wolves from Arabia and India, but clearly separated from the even smaller golden jackal [9,10,11,12]. On these morphological grounds, Ferguson [9] proposed to consider lupaster as a subspecies of gray wolf, with a distribution restricted to Egypt and Libya. Wolves (from Ethiopia) were larger–but slender-looking–than the usual golden jackal phenotype, expanding the gray wolf’s range more than 2500 km south-east into the African continent
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