Red wolf

He said a favorite among kids is this blind possum, Violet.

And there are also rare breeds too, like American Red Wolves.

The only two American Red Wolves that you'll find here in the state of Kentucky are here at the Woodlands Nature Station, part of our captive breeding program, which we've had about 14 puppies born here and then placed in other breeding facilities all throughout the country.

So how do the animals wind up at the Land Between the Lakes site?

We do a lot of adoption of animals and give them forever homes.

Yeah

... well, we have these endangered species and we need to restore them, and one of those endangered species was the red wolf.

And what, what happens is you sort of...

This story finds itself at the nexus between ideals and pragmatism where people...

They would probably be extinct.

Americans very slowly were realizing we had red wolves in the 1960s.

Most Americans did not know that there was such a thing as a red wolf, that it was a different species than the gray wolf.

Most Americans w- uh, would not have cared much, and even today most people don't even know that this species exists.

Today is another fantastic episode.

I invited Aspen S or better known as at wildlife with Aspen on Instagram to talk to me about her career as an ethical red wolf guide in North Carolina.

This podcast is all about wildlife, specifically research or work, whether that is professional or personal, so that you can have an impact in your community, and together we can change the world by helping people, animals, and nature.

I like to help people of all ages, from kids to people who are older, in their 50s, career changers.

Aspen is a fancy scientist.

And in the podcast, we talk about some of the animal jewelry that she's wearing and her apartment decor.

But professionally, she is a red wolf guide, which I was intrigued by.

I know that a lot of my audience is really interested in ecotourism.

Mm.

And that's, you know, in Eastern North Carolina, you've also got the red wolves.

Do you know anything about those? The-

So we...

They're native to coastal South Carolina, and there's actually a place, um, it's up around Pawleys Island, Georgetown, Char- a little north of Charleston where they have like a red wolf, uh, sanctuary, like an enclosure.

Few hundred acres, thousand acres, I don't know how big it is.

But they've actually got, I don't know, like eight or 10 red wolves in this enclosure.

And, uh, I mean, they all got, you know, GPS tracking collars and stuff on them like that, but they're-

Coming up all new here at 4:00, new faces at the Durham Museum of Life and Science.

The pair of wolves who took the place of the endangered red wolves who recently made a move up north.

We'll introduce you.

[upbeat music]

Amber, back to you.

I think so.

And new this afternoon, Durham's Museum of Life and Science welcoming two red wolves this week.

The museum shared these photos of their new wolves.

The US Fish and Wildlife Service makes that determination, along with many other partner facilities, and the pups and young offspring that are products of that breeding activity are candidate, potential candidates for release into the wild.

Real quick example is we had an American red wolf who was born at Wolf Haven in 2016, lived here for seven years.

He exhibited really great aversive behavior, which made him a really good candidate for release in the wild.

He wasn't habituated.

The dire wolves, when we announced the dire wolves, we announced that we had cloned red wolves, which is the most endangered species of wolf in North America, an endemic wolf that, again, is living in a very small population, captive breeding in the Carolinas.

We had colleagues, Bridget von Holtz, um, who works at, who's at Princeton, who had discovered a population of coyote-like animals that have a bunch of red wolf ancestry, some on the order of more than 75% red wolf ancestry.

And so we've cloned these wolves as a means to introduce new red wolf genetic diversity into the existing red wolf population using the same toolkit that we used to be able to clone and generate our dire wolves.

Have you heard about our red wolves?

Mm-mm.

Remember seeing them on TV out on Horn Island? Mm-hmm.

All right, and we still got Red Wolf now with his coach.

They still in there in the woods.

But I've trapped one after I got him right to my lounge down here several years ago.

I'm Sam Jones, and I'm joined by my co-host, Deboki Chakravarti.

And today, we're talking with scientists about what it takes to conserve animals, particularly the red wolf, harlequin frogs, and of course, the cheetah.

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When you think about conservation, there are some major things that have to be addressed at a systemic level, but there's also a lot of science.

They don't have normal cyclicity.

It's kind of all over the place, but they're not seasonal.

And so with an animal whose oocyte readiness is hard to predict, some scientists are asking what if you could have those oocytes develop outside of the body, which brings us to our next conservation story, the red wolf.

These are truly America's wolf.