SEA WOLVES

     The dog family is a successful one, with many adaptable species in several habitats all over the world, except Antarctica.  Species in that widespread family include gray wolves, jackals, dingoes, Arctic foxes, the many breeds of domestic dogs, and sea wolves.

     Sea wolves are a race of gray wolves, but are a bit smaller and browner than their ancestors.  Sea wolves have lived for thousands of years on islands and shorelines along the Pacific Ocean where it washes ashore on the coasts of Canada and Alaska.  About ninety percent of sea wolf food is from the Pacific, including sea otters, seals, salmon, clams, fish eggs and washed up, dead whales, squid and other ocean critters.  When the tide goes out, they check beaches for stranded sea creatures.  They even wade and swim in surf in a search for food.  Today, members of the dog family fill niches from the Pacific Ocean shores to the beagle sleeping on your couch. 

     I see the adaptable sea wolves slowly following in the steps of polar bears, sea otters, seals and whales that descended from land-based mammals that, long ago, gradually became better adapted to foraging for food, then living, in the oceans, for at least part of their lives, more or less, depending on the species.  Scientists believe whales descended from bear-like, land mammals that, long-ago, foraged along ocean shorelines.  Seal ancestors did the same.  And sea otters, which are members of the land-based weasel family, evolved to life in the Pacific Ocean.  Perhaps, sea wolves will slowly adapt to life in the oceans, similarly to how other land mammals did, given time.   

        

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