Talk:Hokkaido wolf

message: * The o in the romaji for okami should have a macron (long vowel).
* The hiragana for the long o are unusual, oo instead of ou.
* I got zero google hits for 蝦夷狼 because 蝦夷 is unusual and the pronunciation needs to be explained, so there are a lot of hits for 蝦夷(えぞ）狼 (hiragana in the brackets). Kappa 03:44, 15 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Notes on kanji etc:

message: That's one ugly wolf.  It looks more like a Tasmanian Tiger than a real canine... does anyone have a better portrait of the creature?  I think this one looks a lot better.
http://cbc.amnh.org/crisis/images/wolf.jpg
--M.Neko 06:56, 21 September 2006 (UTC)
replies: text: I reformatted the page so that the picture is in the taxobox, and I reworded your additions so they fit into the middle of the article. If you'd like more info about how to format stuff can I suggest that you check out the Wikipedia:Manual of Style? It's very useful. Cheers, Ziggurat 01:45, 20 March 2006 (UTC)
thread_title: Misc page discussion

message: Canis lupus hattai appears to be extinct, however there is a very remote possibility that it is not. We know that it had a distinct morphology (Kishida 1931, Pocock 1935) and that it was genetically related  to North American wolves (Ishiguro 2010, Matsumura 2014). It is clear that it no longer exists on Hokkaido island. We have no information of its status on the Kamchatka Peninsula. Reports from the Kuril islands have been mixed since the 1900s, with some stating that they were in existence there up until the 1960s when a survey at that time could not find any (Heptner 1998). The description of the "Sakhalin wolf" is regarded as "unsatisfactory" (Heptner 1998) and so its description is not clear. It must be kept in mind that the wolf went extinct on Hokkaido in 1889 but was recognized there as a distinct subspecies by Kishida in 1931, or 42 years after it had gone extinct, and prior to that it was assumed to be a larger local variant of the Japanese wolf then later a relative of wolves from Siberia (Walker 2005). Its reporting is also mixed, with one writer stating that it has not been seen since the start of the last century (Heptner 1998) but another reporting that it was there in 1945 (Harper 1945). Confounding this is the report of "Siberian forest wolves" making there way to the island from time to time when the Nevelskoy Strait ices over (Heptner 1998). Which means that these wolves would be coming from the Amur River region of the Russian Pacific coast, and conversely it is possible that samples of hattai could have gone the other way as wolves tend to prefer to expand into very similar habitat, and if pressured they will either go extinct or migrate (Leonard 2015). So, how do we tell a Siberian forest wolf from hattai if the description is not clear? The only way to tell would be by a DNA sample or oestology (what its skull and teeth tell us). The last study that I could find from the Amur region was conducted in the Sikhote-Alin (16,000 square kilometres of UNESCO protected area) that looked at the Amur tiger and wolves as competing predators - the area was so remote and these competitors so wary and stealthful around each other that the study depended on signs of their tracks to estimate their numbers (Miguel 2005). Based on the information available to us at this time, and until a more thorough study is taken, hattai is probably extinct. However, it may have admixed with "Siberian forest wolves" and so one day an analysis of the mDNA of one sample may show it to be the descendent of a female hattai. It then becomes a phenotype/genotype argument as to what name scientists might assign to that specimen. William Harris •  talk •   22:04, 15 April 2016 (UTC)
thread_title:  Extinct?