which animal has more variations, the gray wolf or the domestic dog

Question

Why would this animal have more variations? What mechanism is in place for ensuring these multiple variations?

Answer 1

The domestic dog. The reason for this is selective breeding. Dogs and wolves are descended from a common wild ancestor. Humans have adopted dogs as helpers and companions, selectively breeding them for desired characteristics. In other words, dogs that have good scenting abilities were bred with others with those same abilities to produce a line of dogs in which there is greater and greater consistency, with each successive generation, in the ability of the offspring to follow a scent and retrieve alongside their human parners.

 

Dogs such as border collies where selectively bred for their herding ability, and so on. Selective breeding of dogs as a hobby  started in the Victorian era. People began breeding all sorts of dogs and showing them. Now, we have over 400 recognized breeds with the problems of overbreeding and inbreeding. Take the English Bulldog and German Shepherd (GSD), for example. Both dogs have been overbred to the point of physical deformity with resultant health problems, the bulldog with its brachycephalic (flat) face, and the GSD with its highly angular back.

 

I recommend you look into Belyaev's farm fox experiment that was conducted, and is still ongoing in the former Soviet Union. In just 4 generations, the animals were showing signs of domestication. What Belyaev learned is that his artificial selection for tameness also produced variation in the phenotype of the foxes. Domestication produced more variation than was seen in the foxes that were not selectively bred because they had a greater tendency to flee human contact. It was only those foxes that were more tame that were bred, and an unintended effect was to produce a line of animals that was not only tamer and increasingly domesticated with each successive generation, but also animals with greater variation in physical appearance, for example, coat color and pattern.

 

There is not that much variation in wolves. The International Wolf Center in Ely, MN is a good source of reliable information about wolves. I recommend you check out their website for more information.