Golden jackal is a wolf-like canid that is native to Southeast Europe, Southwest Asia, South Asia, and regions of Southeast Asia. It is listed as ‘least concern’ on the IUCN Red List due to its widespread distribution and high density in areas with plenty of available food and optimum shelter. The Jackal is expanding beyond its native grounds in Southeast Europe into Central and Northeast Europe.
About Golden jackal in brief
Golden jackal is a wolf-like canid that is native to Southeast Europe, Southwest Asia, South Asia, and regions of Southeast Asia. It is listed as ‘least concern’ on the IUCN Red List due to its widespread distribution and high density in areas with plenty of available food and optimum shelter. Golden jackals are abundant in valleys and beside rivers and their tributaries, canals, lakes, and seashores. Jackal–dog hybrids called Sulimov dogs are in service at the Sheremetyevo Airport near Moscow where they are deployed by the Russian airline Aeroflot for scent-detection. The oldest golden jackal fossil, found at the Ksar Akil rock shelter near Beirut, Lebanon, is 7,600 years old. The jackal’s competitors are the red fox, wolf, jungle cat, wildcat, in the Caucasus the raccoon, and in Central Asia the Asiatic wildcat. The Jackal is expanding beyond its native grounds in Southeast Europe into Central and Northeast Europe, occupying areas where there are few or no wolves. Although the jackal group has traditionally been considered as homogenous, genetic studies show that Jackals are not monophyletic, and they are only distantly related. The next most closely related are the coyote, golden jackals, and Ethiopian wolf, which have all been shown to hybridize with the wild dog in the wild. These are members of the genus Canis and are followed by the black-backed and side-striped jackals and the dhole dog, which are the most basal members of this clade.
In 2015 a major DNA study concluded that the six Caureus subspecies found in Africa should be reclassified under the new species Canthus Cureus thus. The study concluded the six subspecies should be reduced to seven to reduce the number of goldenjackal subspecies to seven. The species is more closely related to the gray wolf, coyote, African golden wolf, and Ethiopia wolf than it is to the African black- backed jackal or side-stripeed jackal. All species within the wolf- like canids share a similar morphology and possess 78 chromosomes, allowing them potentially to interbreed. The basic social unit of which consists of a breeding pair and any young offspring. It is very adaptable, with the ability to exploit food ranging from fruit and insects to small ungulates. They will attack domestic fowl and domestic mammals up to the size of domestic water buffalo calves. They were once thought to have different distributions across Africa with their ranges overlapping in East Africa. The accuracy of the colloquial name ‘jackal’ to describe all jackals is therefore questionable. They are the same size, possess similar dental and skeletal morphology, and are identified from each other primarily by their coat color. They were previously thought to be separate species with different ranges across Africa.
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This page is based on the article Golden jackal published in Wikipedia (as of Dec. 01, 2020) and was automatically summarized using artificial intelligence.
