WoW Taxonomy III: Lycaon

This week I did a little search for Lycaon, one of the many suggestions given to me in the comments of the introductory post. This one came from Brian from Laelaps, who had a brief affair with World of Warcraft that his computer did not particularly like.

Lycaon is a popular name. There are 77 toons named Lycaon on the North American servers, and another 51 in Europe. From the European server Doomhammer, we have a troll hunter named Lycaon who seems to have recently hit level 70 (grats!).

IRL, Lycaon is the genus name of Lycaon pictus, the African wild dog, the beautifully mottled pack hunters of central and southern Africa. L. pictus is said to be "crepuscular", meaning that they hunt during twilight hours in the early morning and just before dark.

They are deadly hunters, as relentless as other canids, relying on stamina and endurance to wear out their prey before they move in for the kill. L. pictus also happens to have the highest bite force quotient of all living Carnivora (Wroe et al. 2005).

Biologists trace the wild dog's ancestry (and indeed all of Carnivora) back to to Miacis, a small, weasel like mammal extant about 40 million years ago. The ancient North American hunter Tomarctus is the accepted common ancestor of all canids, including L. pictus. Tomarctus hunted on the plains of North America about 10 million years ago.

Now, to be fair, the large number of Lycaons out there is probably due to the name's place Greek mythology. There are two Lycaons. One was sold into slavery by Achilles and later dispatched by the hero's sword, the other was the first king of Arcadia, who, after trying to feed Zeus human flesh for dinner, was turned into a wolf by the father god. We get the word lycanthrope (werewolf) from the latter Lycaon.

Like many territorial hunters, L. pictus is losing ground to development and hunting, and is being pushed into fiercer competition for food with the larger African predators like lions and hyenas. Historically, L. pictus numbered in the hundreds of thousands. Today, the current estimate of the wild dogs is about 3,000.