Once the red wolf's historic range stretched from Long Island to Missouri and down to the Texas-Mexico border. But by 1972 their population was reduced to a small area along the Gulf coast due to habitat loss and hunting.
To conserve the species，14 individuals were caught as part of a reproducing(繁殖) program. In 1980 their wild relatives were declared extinct—the caught wolves were all that was left and thus lots of genetic variation was lost. You can't help it when you have so few founders.
Kristin Brzeski is an assistant professor at Michigan Technological University, whose research focuses on the conservation of genetics of wild animal populations. He thought this work had been anunderdogscientifically and for conservation, for all wolves decreased in amount dramatically, especially the red wolves. Now, Brzeski and her co-workers have found a surprising new pool of red wolf genes that might help bring more diversity to the tiny population:they found the disappearing genes of red wolves in wild coyote (土狼) populations. But why did this happen?
Remember：when a population is dying out，it might find the closest related species as their own best mate，so a red wolf and a coyote can have offspring (后代). As a result，people can rediscover their genes in their coyote hybrid offspring. As red wolves are released back into the wild, reproducing with these coyotes could help the critically endangered species regain some of its genetic diversity.
This would be kind of the opposite direction: take the existing small population that still has red wolf genes that are so critical, and put them into a wild landscape with new genetic variation that they haven't seen for 50 years or more. And all of a sudden, hopefully, this is like a super mix of genetic health and sort of a rebound that these animals can be wild and be themselves again.
The next step will include how to release red wolves in a way that takes advantage of the genes red wolves hiding in coyote populations. There should be a philosophy in our mind that we created this problem, so we should be responsible for fixing it.
