African Wolf discovered in Morocco

A group of researchers led by Pr. Vicente Urios from the University of Alicante has announced the discovery of the African Wolf (Canis lupus lupaster) in the Middle Atlas Mountains, Morocco. Mr Urios said it is "a fabulous find". The wolfs were photographed by camera photo trapping since a year and a half ago. The full report of this discovery will be published in the September issue of the Quercus magazine: “Detectanal lobo en Marruecos gracias al uso del foto-trampeo” by Vicente Urios, Carlos Ramírez, Miguel Gallardo and Hamid Rguibi Idrissi.

The researchers detailed that the Berbers inhabiting the area where they worked talk about two types of “jackals”, one large and one small. The largest would actually be, according to the work of Vicente Urios’s team, a wolf. "They even have a word for wolf, but always thought it were jackals" says Urios.

The photographs show an animal with "obvious wolf characteristics, such as a large body, slender, with a powerful neck, tall individuals with darker mantle and short tail." The photo is taken in the Atlas at about 1,800 meters.

This discovery extends the known distribution area of the African Wolf (Canis lupus lupaster) westwards by more than 3000 Km to North-west Africa (see Rueness et al. 2011).

African wolfs also in north-eastern Algeria and Senegal

An article published in PLoS ONE by Gaubert et al. on 10 August 2012 put more light on the African Wolf Canis lupus lupaster in North and West Africa and put forward its uniqueness among other wolf lineages:

"The African wolf appeared as a distinct genetic entity. Genetic distances with the other wolf lineages ranged between 1.9 and 4.3%, whereas they reached 4.5 to 9.3% between the African wolf and the different lineages of jackals. The uniqueness of the African wolf was reinforced by the fact that it had the highest level of haplotype and nucleotide diversity among gray wolf lineages, even exceeding that of the Holarctic wolves and dogs, and far greater than what was found for the Himalayan and Indian wolves".

"It is most likely that C. l. lupaster has been roaming in Africa since (at least) the Middle to Late Pleistocene, and that the African wolf and a cline of smaller morphotypes, traditionally defined as ‘golden jackals’, have been co-occurring in Africa since that period, without any clear morphological, temporal or ecological delineation (Geraads 2011)".

References:

Gaubert P, Bloch C, Benyacoub S, Abdelhamid A, Pagani P, et al. (2012) Reviving the African WolfCanis lupus lupaster in North and West Africa: A Mitochondrial Lineage Ranging More than 6,000 km Wide. PLoS ONE 7(8): e42740. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0042740

Geraads D. (2011) A revision of the fossil Canidae (Mammalia) of north-western Africa. Palaeontology 54: 429–446.

Rueness EK, Asmyhr MG, Sillero-Zubiri C, Macdonald DW, Bekele A, et al. (2011). The Cryptic African Wolf: Canis aureus lupaster Is Not a Golden Jackal and Is Not Endemic to Egypt. PLoS ONE 6(1): e16385. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0016385

Urios V., Ramírez C., Gallardo M. & Rguibi Idrissi H. (2012). Detectan al lobo en Marruecos gracias al uso del foto-trampeo. Quercus 319 (Septiembre 2012)

An African Wolf photographed in the Atlas Mountains, Morocco (© Vicente Urios). This photo obtained from the Facebook Page of Quercus  magazine. See the discussion here.

More photographs of Moroccan wolves at the Facebook page of “Grupo de Investigación de Zoología de Vertebrados” of the University of Alicante.

An African Wolf at an agricultural landscape between Skikda and El-Kala, Algeria (photograph: Slim Benyacoub). doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0042740.g004

Découverte du loup africain (Canis lupus lupaster) au Maroc et en Algérie:

Une équipe scientifique (Urios et al. 2012) a annoncé la découverte du loup africain (Canis lupus lupaster) dans les montagnes du Moyen Atlas, au Maroc. Une autre équipe (Gaubert et al. 2012) a découvert le loup africain au nord de l’Algérie et au Sénégal. voir les références ci-dessus.

by Mohamed Amezian