FAST TRACK: Legacy lost: genetic variability and population size of extirpated US grey wolves (<i>Canis lupus</i>)
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By the mid 20th century, the grey wolf (Canis lupus) was exterminated from most of the conterminous United States (cUS) and Mexico. However, because wolves disperse over long distances, extant populations in Canada and Alaska might have retained a substantial proportion of the genetic diversity once found in the cUS. We analysed mitochondrial DNA sequences of 34 pre-extermination wolves and found that they had more than twice the diversity of their modern conspecifics, implying a historic population size of several hundred thousand wolves in the western cUS and Mexico. Further, two-thirds of the haplotypes found in the historic sample are unique. Sequences from Mexican grey wolves (C. l. baileyi) and some historic grey wolves defined a unique southern clade supporting a much wider geographical mandate for the reintroduction of Mexican wolves than currently planned. Our results highlight the genetic consequences of population extinction within Ice Age refugia and imply that restoration goals for grey wolves in the western cUS include far less area and target vastly lower population sizes than existed historically.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".