🦊 A one-eyed
bandit fox face greeted me right at the entrance to the national park. I see these furry neighbors on my runs a couple of times a week. They are neither shy nor particularly concerned about manners: once, a fox sat down by the roadside to poop and did not even bother to stop when I ran past just a couple of meters away.
This time, though, the animal happened to walk straight into the camera frame. But posting a
video without a story or at least a few curious facts would feel far too easy, so here are some surprising things I found out about these South American predators.
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It is not really a foxNature basically invented the fox twice through convergent evolution.
The animal in the video is a
culpeo, or
zorro culpeo. It looks very fox-like, but evolutionarily it belongs to a South American branch of canids and is closer to wolf- and jackal-like relatives than to the familiar red fox.
Long ago, the ancestors of my one-eyed acquaintance were larger, more wolf-like canids living in North America. When the Isthmus of Panama formed and opened a land route into South America, the great-great-great-grandparents of our hero headed south in search of adventure — and, presumably, better-fed rabbits.
In their new home, there was an ecological niche waiting to be filled: the kind of role that foxes occupy in Europe. To succeed in it, an animal needed to be flexible in what it ate, fast on its feet and good at hunting all sorts of small prey.
For that job, a lighter body, long legs, large ears and a fluffy tail for balance are all very useful.
Give evolution a million or two years and you end up turning something wolf-like into something that looks remarkably like a fox. But genetically, this “fox” is still much closer to wolf-like South American canids than to the European red fox.
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From fox to dog — and back againThere is evidence that Indigenous peoples of Patagonia and Tierra del Fuego kept and possibly partly domesticated culpeos, producing what became known as the
Fuegian dog. The story is most often associated with the
Selk’nam — the people whose striking striped body paint and unusual ceremonial costumes now appear on souvenirs all over Patagonia.
But they did not walk around dressed like that every day. The paint, masks and elaborate costumes were used on specific ceremonial occasions. In everyday life, people wore practical clothing made from animal skins and moved across Tierra del Fuego hunting, travelling and living alongside their tamed wolf-fox-dog companions.
Humans and these animals may have lived together for generations, perhaps even for thousands of years, long enough for the phenotype of the tamed culpeos to begin to change.
Then colonization destroyed the Selk’nam’s traditional way of life, and the Fuegian dogs disappeared.
But that does not necessarily mean they simply went extinct.
Some researchers have suggested that at least part of the population may have interbred with wild culpeos and gradually dissolved back into the wild population.
One preserved Fuegian dog specimen survived in a museum. Its DNA was later analyzed, and the result was fascinating: genetically, it turned out to be far closer to the wild culpeo than to domestic dogs.
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