Gray wolf (Canis lupus)
Service project at the Center of Ecological and Evolutionary Synthesis (CEES), University of Oslo, Norway.
Hybridization in the Scandinavian wolf
The wolf, once abundant in Europe, was declared to be extinct in Scandinavia in the mid 1960’s. However, in the early 1980’s, a couple of wolves from the Russian-Finnish population migrated to southern Sweden, founding a new wolf population currently numbering around 500 individuals. Although further immigrants arrived, the current Scandinavian wolf population is highly inbreed. A classical fairy tale wolf is large and strong, and its fur is gray in color - the phenotype of Scandinavian wolf however appears to be more variable, with narrow skulls and the fur can be a mix of white, yellowish and black. These phenotypic differences between the Russian-Finnish population and the Scandinavian wolves has led to the suspicion that the wolves in Norway and Sweden may have hybridized with dogs (Canis lupus familiaris). In order to clarify the extent to which the Scandinavian wolf and dogs have interbreed, the sequencing center at the University of Oslo was contacted to perform whole-genome sequencing of a number of Norwegian wolves, Scandinavian dogs, and known wolf-dog hybrids. The results are already publicly available as short report in Norwegian, with an English Materials & Methods part.
