Falkland Islands wolf

How did the Falkland Islands wolf reach the Falkland Islands?

As early as 1690, British visitors to the Falkland Islands wondered about the only land mammal living there among all the small creatures. There were not even mice there. What did this wolf feed on? The British naturalist Charles Darwin, who visited the remote islands in 1833 during his voyage around the world on the HMS Beagle, was also astonished by the presence of the animal, which he called a fox. How did this predator, which according to Darwin’s travel diaries fed on birds, reach the islands? The South Atlantic archipelago lies almost 500 kilometers from the east coast of Argentina and was never connected to the continent.

The Falkland Islands, with their constantly cold, windy and rainy climate, consist of about 200 islands, few of which are larger than ten square kilometers. More than 60 bird species live there, and millions of penguins breed along the coasts among South American sea lions, fur seals and elephant seals.

Only in 2013 did Australian scientists succeed in solving the mystery of the presence of the only native land mammal, the Falkland Islands wolf. Researchers from the Australian Centre for Ancient DNA compared, for a study, the genome of the Falkland Islands wolf specimen that Darwin himself had collected with other extinct foxes. The result was that 16,000 years ago, at the height of the last ice age, the Falkland Islands wolf used shallow, frozen places between the islands and the continent to walk across. On the way it could feed on penguins or seals. For smaller mammals such as rats, the route to the islands would have been too long; they would have starved on the way. This also explains why the Falkland Islands wolf was the only mammal on the islands.

For a long time, scientists assumed that the Falkland Islands wolf was a feral domestic dog. It was suggested that South American Indigenous people had brought them along as pets when they inhabited the Falkland Islands 20,000 years ago.

Falkland Islands wolf – fact sheet

alternative names	Falklands wolf, Falklands fox, Falkland fox, Warrah, Falkland Islands dog, Warrah fox, Antarctic wolf
scientific names	Dusicyon australis, Canis australis, Dusicyon darwini, Dusicyon antarcticus, Canis antarcticus, Pseudalopex antarcticus
original range	Falkland Islands (South Atlantic)
time of extinction	1876
causes of extinction	hunting
IUCN status	extinct

Falkland Islands wolf or Falkland fox?

Darwin referred to the Falkland Islands wolf as a fox, which somehow makes sense, because the Falkland Islands wolf—or Falkland fox—was not gray like a wolf, but reddish brown like a fox. Whether fox or wolf, both belong to the dog family (Canidae), which is divided into true foxes (Vulpini) and true dogs (Canini). Like wolves, jackals and coyotes, the Falkland Islands wolf belongs to the true dogs, despite its fox-like appearance.

Using DNA comparisons, biologists were able to determine that the South American maned wolf (Chrysocyon brachyurus), which looks hardly similar to the Falkland Islands wolf, is its closest living relative. The closest, but already extinct, relative of the Falkland Islands wolf was the Argentinean warrah. It is also considered the ancestral form of the Falkland Islands wolf, because the two species diverged 16,000 years ago, when the Falkland Islands wolf set off for the Falkland Islands.

The Falkland Islands wolf occurred on the main islands of West Falkland and East Falkland, each about 6,000 square kilometers in size. The Falkland Islands wolves of West Falkland were said to be smaller and redder in color than those of East Falkland, according to Darwin in his travel account Voyages of the Adventure and Beagle Volume III. (1839).

Darwin, who later founded the theory of evolution, wrote while arranging his notes for the final part of the Beagle expedition about his growing suspicion that both the differences between the various mockingbirds and tortoises on the Galápagos Islands and the differences between the wolves on the western and eastern main islands were variants. Depending on which island the animals came from, certain traits were expressed differently.

From apex predator to perhaps the first wild canid to become extinct in historical times

In the ecosystem of the Falkland Islands, the Falkland Islands wolf stood at the top of the food pyramid as the only land mammal. It had neither predators nor food competitors. It probably fed on ground-nesting birds and penguins. Perhaps it also ate some plant food, but that is not certain.

During his visit to the sparsely settled Falkland Islands in 1833, Darwin described the Falkland Islands wolf as a common and tame animal that literally ate from the hand. Only 43 years later, the Falkland Islands wolf had been exterminated.

In the early 19th century, Argentine settlers first hunted the Falkland Islands wolf; from the 1830s onward, American fur traders joined them. In the 1860s, Scottish settlers finally landed on the islands with their sheep flocks. A wolf naturally poses a threat to sheep, so the Falkland Islands wolf was declared fair game. The British administration had been paying a bounty for every animal shot since 1839. Many of the settlers also laid out poisoned bait or set the vegetation on fire.

No one today knows whether the Falkland Islands wolf actually posed a danger to the sheep. But it was certainly easy to exterminate the tame species, especially since the dwarf shrub heaths on the islands would have offered the wolves few places to hide.

Darwin already predicted in his travel account of 1839 that the Falkland Islands wolf would soon “stand on a level with the Dodo, as an animal which has perished from the face of the earth”. Within the few years during which the Falkland Islands were actively settled, the number of Falkland Islands wolves on West and East Falkland had declined sharply. By 1865 there were no wolves left in the eastern part of East Falkland. The last Falkland Islands wolf was probably shot in 1876 in Shallow Bay, West Falkland, according to the IUCN.

Today there are no Falkland Islands wolves left on the Falkland Islands, but besides sheep there are several other introduced mammals, such as mice, rats, rabbits and cats.

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