That was what I was trying to say, I just phrased it poorly. The animal has a “summer” coat for the Grey Fox, along with whatever mutation or expression is causing it to have exceptionally short hair.
What I was trying to say was that it was either expressinga mutation, or was expressing an extreme phenotype. That is what I meant by “at the extreme of phenotypic plasticity,” i.e. for whatever reason, hair growth was greatly reduced. I didn’t say it was in the normal range. What I meant by not being surprised was that very few things surprise me in terms of morphology.
Agree. It doesn’t look like a sick animal.
Remember, never assign to design what can be assigned to poor memories of ecology class.
The link from Darwin’s Finch surprised me with the revelation that grey foxes can climb trees,unlike any other foxes!
Well,this would explain why they’re rarely seen. They’ve gone arboreal,and don’t leave the treetops except late at night to search for food,especially their beloved corn.Losses from corncribs would naturally be attributed to deer and those animals that look like Liza Minelli.
They’ll probably never be able to trap one until they start setting them in the trees,baited with maize,the way the Amerindians did.
This was silly,but not as wonderfully silly as porcupine’s corndog line. I salute you.
I’ll vote with the “definitely a fox” crowd on this one. But I’m as mystified as the next guy about the short hair, except that it’s probably not mange.
On another note, did the guy SEE the thing eat the corn? or did he just put corn out and find it gone? I’d say he’s got weird foxes AND squirrels in his back yard.
There’s nothing in the frame with the mystery beast to provide scale, so anyone alleging that it is “too small to be A” or “too big to be B” is barking up the wrong tree.
As **Bosda ** mentioned, it does look like there’s a possibility that it is a female who is about to welp, which further complicates the proportion arguments, along with the whole lack of hair thing. Pregnancy would also makes it unlikely (to an even greater degree) that this is a hybrid of some kind, as hybrids are often sterile.
The May 20th photo, if she’s pregnant, falls well within the reproductive season for Grey foxes…
and Red foxes…
…but it also falls in line with the reproductive cycles of a whole host of other critters too.
The lack of hair has a variety of possible (and relatively plausible) explanations. The animal could have survived a serious case of mange without freezing to death over the winter, or perhaps it suffers something like hypothyroidism. Maybe the hair loss is due to some sort of chemical or other variable in the environment.
For now, I’m in the “strangely bald, pregnant, Grey Fox” camp.
Even a summer coat of a Gray Fox is much longer than that shown in the photo, and a fox would never show a nearly hairless tail in any normal pelage state (at least any time after soon after birth). So the appearance really has little if anything to do with any seasonal variation in pelage. I don’t think it’s possible to tell what state of pelage the animal is in.
“Phenotypic plasticity” refers to the fact that a single genotype can result in a range of different phenotypes. If the appearance is due to a mutation, or even to the expression of a rare recessive allele, then it is due to a the animal having a different genotype from the “normal” one, so that the term “phenotypic plasticity” doesn’t apply.
Very well then. (But it is better not to base an answer in GQ on such memories.)
My point was that it is not out of the realm of possibility that the animal has normal hair growth genes, and for whatever bizarre environmental or physiological reasons is expresssing really short hair, ergo phenotypic plasticity; a different, though extreme, phenotype based on “normal” genes. It isn’t very likely, I admit. I am aware of the difference between genotypic and phenotypic plasticity.
Kill the damn thing. Biology is the study of dead animals.
Bah! You people have no imagination. It is quite obviously not a Red or Grey Fox, but rather the unholy result of mixing Bat-Eared Fox, Dhole, Maned Wolf, Simian Jackal and quite unrelated Madagascaran Fossa genetic material in order to create the ultimate dried-corn-raiding killing machine. Soon this trial-run will be over and millions of these unstoppable “biological stealth weapons” will be released in states like Iowa, there to devastate our countries supply of stored grains, corn oils, and corn syrups, causing our economy to collapse in chaos.
I advice all to stock up on cans of creamed and normal corn. The coming times won’t be pretty.
Okay, I’m going to be nearly unhelpful here, but it certainly looks similar to a fox, (though not nearly as fuzzy as the one I saw running around Nashville last month) and I could swear that I’ve seen pictures of an African fox-type animal which looks exactly like that. According to an Audubon magazine that I was reading at the doctor’s office last month (the issue was a couple of years old) that there’s a pretty brisk trade in all kinds of exotic animals on the black market, with many of the buyers not knowing what the hell they’re getting, or how to take care of it, and eventually turning them loose. Perhaps it’s something not native to the area which escaped or was released from a private “collector.”
Just a saying someone I know, an old school, kill-everything-and-stuff-it-or-put-it-in-a-jar biologist says a lot. What the guy really needs to do is get plaster casts of the prints.
Tuckerfan has a good point, if the animal isn’t pregnant. The probability of a successfully breeding pair of some introduced species is slim at best.
But then again she could’ve slipped her captors after she was already knocked up…not that the question needs to get any murkier…
Here is a list of all Canid species, many (but not all :() with pictures.
Black-backed jackal maybe? One of the sample photos indicates an idividual with a similarly low-hanging tummy. The coloring and hair quantity still isn’t right though.
Strangely bald, oddly colored, world traveling, escape artist black-backed jackal? shrug
But then if Tamerlane is correct, we can all expect to be followed around by strikingly handsome men wearing sunglasses and talking into their watches for a while, what with all of this flagrant discussion of WMDs.
No, I’m pretty familiar with African wildlife and there isn’t anything that looks much like this animal. After consulting Kingdon’s African Mammals, Haltenorth and Diller’s Mammals of Africa, and especially Walker’s Mammals of the World, I can state with some confidence that there is no carnivore species anywhere in the world that is a substantially better fit for the mystery animal than Gray Fox is. Some African jackals and foxes have a similar color pattern, but none have the short hair seen in this animal, and nothing has the nearly bare tail.
and talking into their watches for a while, what with all of this flagrant discussion of WMDs.
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