Given that dogs are essentially domesticated wolves bred for various selected characteristics over time would it be possible to reverse the process?
If you started with a pack of say 10 chihuahuas (5 male and 5 females) and no other dogs, and began breeding them for more wolf like physical characteristics would it be possible to get a wolf dog back after some x number of generations?
Probably not. Chihuahuas and other highly modified breeds have been so intensively selected that they have little if any genetic diversity among the genes that define the breed. All individuals will be homozygous at these loci; that is, there will only be one version of the gene present in the population. For example, in chihuahuas all variants that produce large size will have been bred out of the population. You might eventually be able to breed larger size, but it will be a very slow process.
Even if you crossed chihuahuas with some other breed, you probably wouldn’t get a really wolflike animal back unless you included something like a husky or malemute. Mixing of disparate breeds tends to produce mongrels like the classic "yellow dog,"which may resemble the original domestic dog.
Linkee no workee.
Fixed.
You could probably never get back to wolves, because many of the genes that make up wolves have been expelled from the chihuahua bloodline. The chances are that precisely the right mutations will never re-occur in the right order in the remaining life of our planet.
What you could do with relative ease is get back to something that is indistinguishable from a wolf in appearance and behaviour. Of course, after some x number of generations you could also breed chihuahuas into something indistinguishable from whales, or dinosaurs or amoeba or pineapples or any other lifeform that has ever existed.
It should be faster to breed chihuahuas into wolf analogues because they are genetically far closer to wolves, so there will be less time spent waiting for traits to turn up through random mutations. However it might still take a surprisingly long time. Wolves are fairly diverse bunch, and chihuahuas are just a tiny line-breed of that diversity, so you’d expect to need far longer to breed chihuahuas back to wolves then to breed wolves into chihuahuas.
Of course you have the benefits of modern DNA analysis and breeding methodology. So it may still be faster than the original ~10, 000 years that it took to go from wolf to chihuahua. but I wouldn’t bet on it being a lot faster unless you use techniques like breeding a lot of dogs and bombard them with radiation to increase the mutation rates.
Did anyone else read the title as “Could you breed a group of chupacabras back into wolves given enough time?”
No. But I did end up imagining the mind of a chihuahua in the body of a large wolf.
That my friends, is the stuff of nightmares.
Suppose you began instead with a 1000 dogs involving a broad selection of breeds.
Someone in Russia bred foxes (not wolves) into a dog-like breed in an astonishingly small number of generations (something like 20, I believe) just by choosing the most docile in each generation. The resultant animal was not only behaviorally dog-like (no surprise because that’s what it was bred for), but had also acquired some of the physical characteristics.
. . . you’d need some bad-ass mother-fuckin wolves, you know what I’m sayin?
When you cross all possible domestic dogs, you get a dingo-like medium sized yellow dog with a curled up tail. this seems to be the design of the proto-dog. The Carolina Dog is another example. It’s still a domestic dog, canis familiaris. Wolves and dogs are not in the same species, so you won’t get a wolf in any human timescale.
Domestic dogs are currently classified as Canis lupus familiaris, a subspecies of gray wolf. So, yeah, they are in the same species.
I’m assuming that the bracketed portions (by me) of your statement makes explicit the mechanism of the first graf I quoted.
:dubious:
I saw a picture of a basset crossed with an english bull that produced a show quality st bernard.
I have always wondered about the true story of how dogs became domesticated, I tend to believe there were species of wild dogs that just gradually assimilated into mans culture very similar to how rats and cats have done.
Genetic evidence supports the theory that domestic dogs come from wolves and only wolves. No other species of wild dogs were involved. What isn’t clear is if domestication happened once or multiple times.
I would lean toward multiple times. Coyotes and foxes tend to become beggars and oportunists in urban settings. Wolves would never have been much of an issue for man if it were not for domestic livestock. As a rule they show no aggression to man with some exceptions. It is easy to imagine a symbionic relationship developing between the two. Wolves could run and tire down large prey and man could help them actually kill it. If men routinely left scraps of animals that were too much to carry wolves would learn to follow man very quickly. The resulting selective breeding process albiet accidental woud take place rather quickly also.
The link in my first post is of Carolina Dogs, as a classic example of a “yellow dog” phenotype. Other examples are the Australian Dingo and the pariah dogs of Asia.
As has been pointed out, domestic dogs are currently classified as belonging to the same species as the Gray Wolf, Canis lupus. Formerly domestic derivatives of wild species were usually classified as separate species, but the modern tendency is to classify them as the same. In any case, the classification is moot because the Biological Species Concept doesn’t apply to non-natural populations (like domestic animals).
By analogy, suppose you started off with a bunch of M&Ms, of all colors. You could go through and pick out all of the green ones, and re-bag those. But you can’t start with a bunch of green M&Ms and sort your way back to multicolored bags. This is similar to wolves and chihuahuas: All of the chihuahua genes were found in wolf populations, just mixed in with a bunch of other genes, and chihuahuas now have much less variety in their genes than do wolves.
If instead you started with a bunch of M&Ms of all colors, and sorted out all of the green ones, and all of the red ones, and all of the light brown ones, then recombined those bags, you could get a closer approximation of the original bag, but you’d still be missing the dark browns and the yellows. This is like mixing all different domesticated dog breeds together: There are some traits that are common to all dogs, so you’ll still have less diversity than you had from wild wolves (though more than from any single breed).
If it is possible, using chihuahuas would be the slowest route, due to the small litter size to select from.
And starting from a breeding population of 10, as OP describes, would seem likely to cause inbreeding-related problems within a few generations. Not a large enough gene pool for a healthy population in the long run, I would think.
