On Wednesday, Scientific American published an article in which Colossal Biosciences continued its claim to have cloned red wolves and created new founder lines. This language is misleading, incorrect, and could damage current red wolf conservation efforts. Colossal Biosciences cloned coyotes, not critically endangered red wolves.  

As the former field supervisor for the Gulf Coast Canine Project (GCCP), I captured and biopsied coyotes in southwestern Louisiana from 2021-2022. Drs. Brzeski (Michigan Tech), vonHoldt (Princeton), and I founded the group with the intent of better understanding the unique canids found along the Gulf Coast. Could these canids, who contain primarily coyote DNA with varying percentages of red wolf DNA, help us improve our recovery strategies for wild red wolves in North Carolina?  

About One of the Gulf Coast Coyotes Cloned by Colossal  

Data provided by Colossal Biosciences suggests that tissue from one of the coyotes I captured, LA52F, was used to clone “Neka Kayda.” I captured her on Apache Corp property adjacent to Holly Beach in Cameron Parish, Louisiana on April 3, 2022 and assigned her the field ID “LA52F” (her corresponding lab ID is “CL14247”).

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service relied on seven metrics to determine if a canid was a red wolf – LA52F met one of these requirements.  

That was total body length. LA52F’s head length and width, shoulder height, hind foot length, ear length, and body mass were too small to classify her as a red wolf. She was two years old and weighed 17.5 kg at the time of her capture.

	LA52F Morphological Measurements	USFWS Minimum Morphological Standards, Red Wolf Female
Skull length	19 cm	21 cm
Skull width	10 cm	11 cm
Weight	17.5 kg	19 kg
Total Length	138 cm	129.5 cm
Hind Foot Length	22 cm	22.2 cm
Ear Length	11 cm	11.43 cm
Shoulder Length	64.5 cm	67.31 cm

The Wolf Conservation Center supported this effort to learn from the resilient canids who survived across wild landscapes despite decades of persecution, but we chose to part ways with GCCP and their partners in early 2024. We envision a world where wolves thrive and felt we could better accomplish this goal by supporting existing conservation efforts – building empathy for red wolves, participating in captive to wild releases, advocating for policies that benefit wolves, and leading research projects to expand the wild population and range of red wolves. These efforts are proven to work – they just need funding, agency support, and public support.  

Dr. Joseph Hinton, PhD
Senior Research Scientist