Coyote.
Posted on 11/03/2015 3:26:20 PM PST by SJackson
Humans are not newcomers when it comes to messing around with nature. While we haven't created Frankenstein's monster yet, what we do transforms the natural world.
One recent example is the creation of the coywolf — a hybrid of the coyote and the wolf that is also known as the Eastern coyote. According to a new article from The Economist, their population seems to have reached more than a million.
These animals have a completely new genetic makeup: Their genes are about one-quarter wolf DNA and two-thirds coyote DNA; the rest is from domesticated dogs. A 2013 study suggests this dog DNA is mostly from a few specific breeds, including German Shepherds and Doberman Pincers.
Human activity likely played a role in the species' creation. As humans cut down wolves' forest homes and hunted down their populations, the lack of available partners for wolves led them to search elsewhere for mates, leading them to coyotes and dogs.
Scientists think this intermixing began with wild wolves in southern Ontario about a century or two ago.
The coywolves' success is astounding scientists. According to The Economist:
The animal’s range has encompassed America’s entire north-east, urban areas included, for at least a decade, and is continuing to expand in the south-east following coywolves’ arrival there half a century ago. This is astonishing. Purebred coyotes never managed to establish themselves east of the prairies. Wolves were killed off in eastern forests long ago. But by combining their DNA, the two have given rise to an animal that is able to spread into a vast and otherwise uninhabitable territory.
Here's the coyote, which traditionally maxes out at 75 pounds and has pointier features, and readily populates cities:
Coyote.
And this is what a wolf looks like. Wolves are usually bigger, weighing in at about 100 pounds, and prefer more wild habitats.
Wolf.
While the grey wolf and the coyote are each other's closest living relatives, the two animals separated evolutionarily 1 to 2 million years ago.
Usually hybrids — even between two closely related species — don't survive as well as their parent species, but the coywolves seem to be an exception. They've only really emerged in force during the last few decades, but they seem to have a few advantages over their parent species.
According to The New York Times' Moises Velazquez-Manoff: "[The coywolf] can be as much as 40 percent larger than the Western coyote, with powerful wolf-like jaws; it has also inherited the wolf's more social nature, which allows for pack hunting."
According to The Economist: "With larger jaws, more muscle and faster legs, individual coywolves can take down small deer. A pack of them can even kill a moose."
Two coywolf pups in Alberta, Canada.
These animals are even better fitted to our changing world than we thought, and their proliferation has been more "rapid, pervasive, and transformational than once thought," according to The Economist. The genetic combination of the two animals seems especially well suited to the northern habitat. The wolf genes allow the coyote to take down bigger prey, while the coyote genes let them adapt to cities and other populated areas.
The wolves even follow railroads into cities, making themselves scarce during the day — adopting a nocturnal schedule. They even look both ways before crossing the highway.
Another reason the animals are so successful could be their wider diet, according to The Economist:
Coywolves eat pumpkins, watermelons and other garden produce, as well as discarded food. They also eat rodents and other smallish mammals. Many lawns and parks are kept clear of thick underbrush, so catching squirrels and pets is easy. Cats are typically eaten skull and all, with clues left only in the droppings.
To study the hybrids better, scientists went ahead and made some 50/50 hybrids in the lab, mating female coyotes with male grey wolves. That's not exactly like the wild coywolves, but it's similar. And gives scientists a better idea of how successful a mating between the two species would be. While two pregnancies didn't result in live offspring, one litter created six puppies.
Here's the result:
The offspring of mating female coyotes with male grey wolves.
This is what a wild coywolf looks like. This one was spotted in West Virginia.
Coyote wolf hybrid coywolf
The mixing of the two species has even created hybrids with their own distinct sounds — taking the wolves' howl and the coyotes's yipping and turning it into a "yip-howl." You can hear it about 45 seconds into this camera-trap video, uploaded to YouTube by simplenotme:
Well now lookee here..
100%
I actually prefer it to 'Call Of The Wild'
Why is this bad thing?
It has a much happier ending.
Nobody reads “White Fang†anymore.
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Wow! I read that book when I was about 7 y/o and thought it was great!
We’ve got 80 lb coyotes around here and the “authorities†have been telling us that they don’t hybridize with wolves.
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Don’t have wolves here in the DFW Metro area, AFAIK. When I was a member of a CC in Argyle TX (Denton suburb), coyotes had a den somewhere along one of the creek banks and had pups. ....While playing golf, we’d often see them running across the fairways and folks in neighboring houses began complaining about missing cats and small dogs.
The club let three of the employees (students at the local university) stay out there late one night with their rifles. Next morning there were 4 dead coyotes along with 3 dead armadillos that had been ripping up a couple of tee boxes.
You might be surprised perhaps to know that there are Eastern Coyotes living in NYC.
That Howling? Just New York’s Neighborhood Coyotes
When I lived in NE Baltimore City, yes inside the city limits and two blocks from the very busy Belair Road, in an area lot far from a big wooded park and my yard backing up to a smaller wooded area, I used to regularly see foxes – I had a whole family of them living behind my house and early one morning saw one lying on the top of my picnic table and we also had in our backyard urban wild life sanctuary, raccoons, opossums, rabbits (and I would often hear the screams of a rabbit presumably being caught by one of the foxes), snakes, box tortoises, salamanders, a woodpecker and a pair of white tailed hawks, quite a few feral cats and of course, a gazillion squirrels. Coming home late night I saw what I at first thought was a very big fox or a stray dog, but as it sauntered past my car, it was clearly a coyote. And on more than one occasion I saw the carcasses of dead dear on the Baltimore Beltway.
I find your story fascinating. Thanks for the education. For us folks living out west, the predators just do not come near our home. The closest a coyote will come is maybe a hundred feet, but that is very rare.
the process is darwinian natural selection
The article misses the obvious.
Humans are the top predator, and have been for at least the last 10,000 years in North America.
NY protects them as “coyote”, NY sucks.
I had to bookmark that. It just seemed the right thing to do!
Thanks for the ping. <3
“...with clues left only in the droppings.”
I might be a little (?) weird, but I enjoy my Nature Walks and checking out the coyote scat to see who they’ve been eating at various times of year.
Interesting article. Mark for later printing. Thanks!
Mr. GG2 who used to be a govt bounty hunter says a couple of those pelts are $200 pelts. No wonder he’s hunting them.
BKMK
I take it you bury the bucket in the ground upto the rim, load it with dirt, propellant, and gravel. Bait it, then keep your ears open?
What to you use to trip it?
.. NY sucks...
More specifically, the Algonquin Provincial Park area in Southern Ontario, around 50 to 75 years ago, and they screwed up the Eastern Red Wolf DNA. This was all done deliberately under controlled circumstances by Canadian Liberals.
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