Journal of Heredity, 2018, 585–597 doi:10.1093/jhered/esy020 Original Article Advance Access publication 8 June 2018 Perspective Is the Red Wolf a Listable Unit Under the US Endangered Species Act? Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/jhered/article-abstract/109/5/585/5034846 by guest on 22 January 2019 Robin S. Waples, Roland Kays, Richard J. Fredrickson, Krishna Pacifici, and L. Scott Mills From the NOAA Fisheries, Northwest Fisheries Science Center, Seattle, WA (Waples); the Department of Forestry & Environmental Resources, North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC (Kays and Pacifici); the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences, Raleigh, NC (Kays); Missoula, MT (Fredrickson); and Wildlife Biology Program and the Office of Research and Creative Scholarship, University of Montana, Missoula, MT (Mills). Address correspondence to L. Scott Mills at the address above, or e-mail:
[email protected]. Received October 25, 2017; First decision January 11, 2018; Accepted May 8, 2018. Corresponding Editor: Fred Allendorf Abstract Defining units that can be afforded legal protection is a crucial, albeit challenging, step in conservation planning. As we illustrate with a case study of the red wolf (Canis rufus) from the southeastern United States, this step is especially complex when the evolutionary history of the focal taxon is uncertain. The US Endangered Species Act (ESA) allows listing of species, subspecies, or Distinct Population Segments (DPSs) of vertebrates. Red wolves were listed as an endangered species in 1973, and their status remains precarious. However, some recent genetic studies suggest that red wolves are part of a small wolf species (C. lycaon) specialized for heavily forested habitats of eastern North America, whereas other authors suggest that red wolves arose, perhaps within the last ~400 years, through hybridization between gray wolves (C.