One State Discovered a Unicorn That Montana Likely Won’t Find
MLive reported that the Michigan Department of Natural Resources asked the public in July to report gray fox sightings so researchers could better map a species it calls one of the state’s least understood mammals — and among the submissions came a 2019 photo from near Hastings of a melanistic gray fox, the only known example in the Midwest.
The agency posted it on Facebook with the pre-emptive disclaimer “No, this is not AI,” where it collected more than 4,000 reactions. The sighting is strange for two reasons: black foxes are almost always melanistic red foxes, since the silver phase is a recessive trait that a century of fur farming spread widely, and wolves and coyotes get their black coats from a dominant gene they inherited from domestic dog…a route the gray fox, the most ancient canid lineage, simply doesn’t share. With no such allele documented in the species and Michigan’s gray fox population already small and possibly declining, a black one requires two hidden carriers meeting in a shrinking gene pool: a coincidence with a camera, not a trend. (Detroit News; Anderson et al. 2009; Kukekova et al. 2012)
Michigan asked for a headcount and got a legend with a timestamp. The Montana version of Montana is a different file entirely: the state’s own natural-heritage field guide lists a red fox account — native, state rank S5, 1,581 observations — and no gray fox account at all, and the gray fox’s documented range excludes the mountains of the Northwest. That flips the cool part. A black fox in a Montana yard would almost certainly be a melanistic red fox, exactly the case Michigan warned about. But a gray fox here, photographed with a date and a location, wouldn’t repeat Michigan’s unicorn — it would be a first, and Montana has no portal asking for one. So the Montana version of “wouldn’t it be cool if” is quieter and stranger: the fox that would make headlines here is the plain gray one, the one that isn’t supposed to be here at all. (Montana Field Guide; Wikipedia — Gray fox)
More Source Info: Detroit News — “Gray foxes may be rarer than previously thought” · McRobie et al. 2019,BMC Evolutionary Biology— multiple origins of melanism · Anderson et al. 2009,Science— melanism in North American gray wolves · Kukekova et al. 2012, Mammalian Genome— genetics of the silver fox · Chicago Sun-Times — melanistic red fox in Northbrook · Montana Field Guide — Red Fox · Wikipedia — Gray fox
Feature image via Outforia
