Dan Flores
speaker
4,468 appearances
23 recordings
4 series
first heard Dec 2024
last heard 18 Aug
Dan Flores’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 12 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
In 2012, U.S.
Fish and Wildlife issued a peer-reviewed monograph offering an entire rethinking of speciation among America's wolves.
An account of the taxonomy of North American wolves claimed that the red wolves and timber wolves of Eastern America were not gray wolves, but ancient continental wolves out of an indigenous line that had also produced coyotes.
Coyotes, Canis rufus, and Canis lycaon are modern representatives of a major and diverse clade that evolved within North America, the monograph read.
The new study concluded that modern gray wolves returned to their evolutionary home in America from Eurasia some 20,000 years ago, arriving here in three different waves, the last wave of which had brought
Mexican wolves to the southwest.
This taxonomy finally explained a phenomenon biologists had first confronted in the 1960s.
In the West, gray wolf-coyote hybridization was rare, if it occurred at all.
The animals seemed to detest one another.
But as the West's predator war drove coyotes to colonize across the country,
Canid standoffishness in the west turned into hookup willingness in the east.
In Louisiana and Texas and along the Canadian border, coyotes interbreeding with remnant wolves produced a new, quite successful eastern canid many would call coy wolves.
Maybe the appearance of animals like this in the east really was, as one New Yorker put it, the end of civilization.
But coyote-wolf hybridization was making a version of wolf recovery possible in an East that had lacked wolves since the 1930s.
Coyote hybridization with red wolves in places like Texas, however, threatened to become an ESA crisis.
What if the red wolf wasn't actually a species, but just a coyote with gray wolf genes?
In my early teens, I was lucky enough to witness what were unmistakably coyotes arriving in the Red River Valley of Louisiana.
But on two occasions, I came face to face with leggy, golden-eyed animals that looked awfully wolfy to a 15-year-old.
If coyotes and red wolf-coyote hybrids were swamping red wolf genetics, much as we humans had once done with Neanderthals,
That mixture sure made for beautiful animals.
Showing 1781–1800 of 4,468 · page 90 of 224
← Previous
Next →