![]() Fish and Wildlife Service 1982) and disagreement regarding an accurate depiction of its historical range has figured prominently in recovery planning. Efforts to recover the Mexican wolf have been underway for >30 years (U.S. There are at least 143 individuals currently living in the wild in Arizona, New Mexico, and Mexico, and about 240 in 48 captive-breeding facilities in the United States and Mexico. The Mexican wolf ( Canis lupus baileyi) is an endangered subspecies indigenous to southwestern North America (Nelson and Goldman 1929). Clarifying the historical range of the Mexican wolf accurately will be foundational to developing a scientifically defensible recovery plan. Rather, it should respect the original descriptions that were made when the animal was still present on the landscape, and which are concordant with ecological relationships, physiography, morphology, and the principles of population genetics. The historical range of the Mexican wolf should not be altered through the identification of similar habitat in other locations, the distribution of inadequately sampled molecular markers, or by theoretical arguments about movement capacity. The historical distribution of the Mexican wolf likely does not correspond to the detected distribution of certain molecular markers. We review morphologic, genetic, and ecological information to illustrate why such historical range extensions are not supported. Extending the historical range northward would necessitate drawing that line far north of transitions in wolf phenotype, breaks in vegetation associations, barriers to gene flow, and differences in prey base. Some of these genetic markers, found in extant Mexican wolves, reportedly also occur in a few individuals far to the north of the range defined in early accounts. Recent suggestions to depict a more extensive northern periphery have been based primarily on a fragmented geographic sampling of genetic markers assumed to be diagnostic at subspecies level. Such accounts are supported by ecological, physiographic, and morphological data. ![]() ![]() Early accounts of its range included the Sierra Madre Occidental, Mexico, and southeastern Arizona, southwestern New Mexico, and sometimes western Texas, USA. We assessed historical, morphological, and genetic information on the range of the Mexican wolf ( Canis lupus baileyi) to plan the recovery of this endangered subspecies. ![]()
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