Federal officials have been working for months to search for and vet new locations for future releases of Mexican wolf packs that have been raised in captivity. Their work is tied to a revision last year in the regulations dictating how Mexican wolves are managed. The new rule provides a nearly tenfold expansion in the area where the wolves can be released across New Mexico and Arizona.

The change was necessary because no space remains in the original release area for more wolves to establish territory, hindering efforts to introduce more captive wolves into the wild, said Sherry Barrett, the Mexican wolf recovery coordinator at the Fish and Wildlife Service.

“If you release wolves and they establish there, you can’t continually put wolves on top of wolves,” Barrett said. “It was really constricting us on where we could put new wolves so we could get the genetics of the wild population more diverse.”

The threat of genetic inbreeding among the animals is well known — on average the degree of relatedness among the wolves in the wild is equivalent to that of siblings, according to wolf recovery team scientists.