A prominent Greek wildlife group on Friday said it had confirmed the first case of a wolf-dog hybrid in the north of the country.<\/p>\n
The Callisto group — which is currently involved in efforts to trap a rogue wolf in Halkidiki, northern Greece — said the hybrid was found near the northern city of Thessaloniki.<\/p>\n
“This is the first genetic (case) to be confirmed in Greece,” Callisto biologist Aimilia Ioakimeidou told a conference in Athens.<\/p>\n
The animal is 45 percent wolf and 55 percent canine according to DNA testing, she said.<\/p>\n
It was discovered during tests on 50 wolf samples from the Greek mainland, Ioakimeidou said.<\/p>\n
While wolf-dog hybrids had previously been reported in Europe, Central Asia and the United States, that categorisation largely stemmed from just the appearance of the animals.<\/p>\n
Later genetic testing has shown such hybrids are rarer than first thought.<\/p>\n
The wolf population in Greece has been growing steadily in past years as a result of a 1983 hunting ban under the Berne Convention.<\/p>\n
According to a recent six-year study recently concluded by Callisto, it stands at 2,075 individuals, including at least three packs of a minimum of 31 wolves in the Mount Parnitha range near Athens.<\/p>\n
The Thessaloniki-based organisation aims to study, protect and manage the populations and habitats of large carnivores such as bears and wolves and other endangered species.<\/p>\n
It is currently mounting an operation to locate a young wolf that injured a five-year-old girl from Serbia in the coastal resort of Neos Marmaras on September 12.<\/p>\n
While domesticated dogs came from a close relative to the grey wolf some 40,000 to 15,000 years ago, the story of their origin has shifted in recent times.<\/p>\n
A longstanding popular theory had held that wolves became tame by hanging around human settlements for food scraps.<\/p>\n
But that has been challenged, and another theory holds that perhaps human hunter-gatherers took wolf pups to rear and they developed into the dogs we have today.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A prominent Greek wildlife group on Friday said it had confirmed the first case of a wolf-dog hybrid…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":201329,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[50],"tags":[200,79],"class_list":["post-201328","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-genetics","tag-genetics","tag-science"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201328","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=201328"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/201328\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/201329"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=201328"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=201328"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=201328"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}