It may be a dirty job, but this nonprofit group of volunteers is collecting scat to try to prove there are wolves in Maine.
The presence of wolves in Maine is hotly debated after they were extirpated from the Northeast due to centuries of bounties, habitat alteration and development.of a possible wolf roaming the trails, researchers must turn to poop, or scat, to really understand if they’ve returned.
John Glowa, the founder of Maine Wolf Coalition , says differentiating between a wolf, a coyote and a hybrid animal on a trail camera is complicated. “We acknowledge the only way to be certain is through DNA,”Some of that evidence is scat samples, which were analyzed in 2020. In addition to deploying trail cameras and pouring over footage looking for wolf-like animals, Glowa and a small team of volunteers have been collecting scat for noninvasive genetic sampling.
Researchers analyzed the samples against a reference database that included genotypes for grey wolves from Northwest Territories, Great Lakes-Boreal wolves from Northeastern Ontario, Eastern wolves from Algonquin Park, Eastern coyotes from southern Ontario, and domestic dogs.Of the 11 samples, six were identified as Eastern coyote, four were not assigned an ancestry due to the quality of the sample, and one received an ancestry assignment value of 0.84 to Eastern wolf.
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