Rare black wolves — could they be wolf-dog mixes?
Video still showing a rare black wolf crossing a stream in a Polish forest last summer. Source: SAVE Wildlife Conservation Fund Poland/AP
‘Rare black wolves caught on camera in Polish forest by wildlife researchers’ ran a recent CNN headline. Zoologist Joanna Toczydlowska, studying beavers, had set camera traps along a river. The footage of two all-black wolves was an unexpected bonus; this colour form is very rare in Europe.
The location is being kept secret; not everyone in Poland loves wolves.
Like Ireland’s ‘mac tire’, the outcast ‘son of the countryside’, the ‘wilk’ has been persecuted in Poland. But wolves there had a crucial advantage over Irish ones. Ours, confined to an island, couldn’t hide from their tormentors, but Polish ones retreated to the great primeval forests and the Carpathians. Legally protected there since 1998, their numbers have increased. There were about 140 wolves in 38 family groups by 2012 and between 2,500 and 3,000 by now.
‘Melanism’, a surfeit of black pigment in fur, feather, and skin, affects creatures great and small. It is found even among insects. Indeed, the colour variations of a common moth provided the most famous example of natural selection in action. The peppered moth has two colour forms. Also known as ‘Darwin’s moth’, it hides in plain sight. In its pale speckled form it mimicked lichen patches on tree trunks. Prior to England’s Industrial Revolution these moths, resting motionless against bark, passed themselves off as lichens.
When the soot and grime of William Blake’s ‘dark satanic mills’ arrived, air pollution killed off the lichens. The lightly-coloured moths became conspicuous against the bare wood. Their enemies thrived. But moths of the dark-brown form were now camouflaged when resting. Soon the darker coloured ones had eclipsed their speckled brethren.
Colour variation can occur naturally. Rathlin Island is said to have ‘golden’ hares with blue eyes. There are two ‘colour phases’ of the snow goose. But often, as with the peppered moth, human agency is responsible for colour expression. Many of the rabbits on Dublin’s Dalkey Island are black. Did people release unwanted pets there? Breeding like rabbits in their new home, their more gaudily-coloured pelages may have given way to black in descendants.
Melanism is common among wolves in some parts of their range, but not in Eastern Europe. Nobody has released captive wolves into Polish forests, so what could be the provenance of Toczydlowska’s pair?
It seems likely that they are one-year-olds, at least one of them a male. Siblings, they would have inherited genes for their black pelage from a common parent.
Wolves and domestic dogs can mate — they belong to the same species and their unions would be blessed with viable offspring. No ‘unnatural practices’ are necessary! It’s an off-the-wall speculation, but did a one-night-stand with a brave dog introduce genes for coloured pelage into the Polish wolf population? If so, colour variations, inherited from the dog, might have resolved to black, as seems to have happened with the Dalkey rabbits?
The jury is still out as to whether wolf-dog unions even occur in the wild. Cross-breeding might be more likely in a small wolf population under survival pressure, with doggy sexual partners freely available, as has been the case in Poland.
‘In a storm, any port is haven’. Did even the mysterious 18th century Beast of Gévaudan have dog-wolf parentage?
