Florida Red Wolf

The Florida red wolf did not have red fur

The Florida red wolf does not bear this name because of its fur color, which was black, but because it is now considered an extinct subspecies of the red wolf (Canis rufus).

This was not always the case. At first, the naturalist William Bartram described the Florida wolf as a separate species in 1791: Rufus niger. However, because of its close relationship to the red wolf, the zoologist Gerrit Smith Miller classified the Florida wolf as a subspecies in 1912.

Florida red wolf – Fact Sheet

alternative names	Cottontail red wolf, Black wolf, Florida black wolf, Florida wolf
scientific names	Canis rufus floridianus, Rufus niger
original range	Maine and Ohio (USA)
time of extinction	1910 at the earliest
causes of extinction	hunting

Somewhat smaller than the gray wolf

The Florida red wolf was once distributed from Florida through Tennessee and Alabama into southern Georgia. At that time, it mainly inhabited swamp and deciduous forests, where its food sources included smaller mammals, birds, fish and fruit.

The Florida wolf was somewhat smaller than the gray wolf and reached a body length of around 150 centimeters; its ears were longer and its muzzle broader, John L. Paradiso and Ronald M. Nowak wrote in a 1974 article.

The Florida wolf killed sheep and deer

The Florida wolf had already been displaced from the swamps of Alabama by 1894, and in Florida, a hunter killed the last animal in 1908.

The probably last wolves of this kind survived in mountainous areas of Alabama around 1910. Since they lacked food there, they began killing farmers’ sheep.

This led people to shoot, capture or poison the last living Florida red wolves. It is said that the last Florida wolf was killed in 1917. However, it then turned out that this specimen was a mixture of red wolf and Florida wolf.

Really a subspecies of the endangered red wolf?

The red wolf, closely related to the gray wolf (Canis lupus), was already considered exterminated in the wild in North America. It has now, however, been successfully reintroduced.

Red wolves are now among the most endangered wolf species in the world. Their original range covered large parts of the southeastern United States; today they occur only in North Carolina.

As described above, scientists assumed that the Florida wolf was a subspecies of the red wolf, but because of its black fur coloration it was also called the Florida Black Wolf.

In addition, however, there is said to have been another reddish-colored species—known by the name Florida Red Wolf—in the same range, which is said to have become extinct in 1921.

Some scientists therefore believe that these are two different species, which, however, are not subspecies of the red wolf but are more closely related to coyotes. The International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature declared this invalid in 1957.

---