'Ghost Genes' Could Help Save The American Red Wolf

Short Wave

NPR

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4.7 • 6K Ratings

🗓️ 22 October 2024

⏱️ 17 minutes

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Summary

Every American red wolf alive right now is descended from only 14 canids. In the 1970s, humans drove the red wolf to the brink of extinction. Because of that, red wolves today have low genetic diversity. But what if we could recover that diversity ... using "ghost genes"?

That's right, today's episode is a ghost story. Along the way, we get into gene dictionaries, the possibilities of poo and how a photo of a common Texas coyote started it all.

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Transcript

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0:17.3	You're listening to short
0:21.4	wave.
0:22.4	From. You're listening to Short Wave Wave. From NPR.
0:26.0	Hey Short Waivers, Emily Quang here.
0:31.0	So today, I'm going to tell you a ghost story about an animal that once
0:36.3	roamed free across the American Southeast the Red Wolf, a wolf with a cinnamon-colored coat that preyed upon deer and small mammals, which allowed
0:46.8	birds and vegetation to thrive.
0:50.2	But early European settlers were afraid of these wolves. They saw them as dangerous predators.
0:55.7	And as the number of people spreading across the continent went up, the number of red wolves went down.
1:02.2	The decline of red wolves in the wild
1:04.9	were due to two primary factors.
1:09.0	And the first one is indeed the predator elimination program.
1:14.0	People were hunting and trapping and killing them.
1:17.0	Bridget Von Holt is a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology
1:20.0	at Princeton University.
1:22.0	And besides hunting, the other thing that led
	...

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