November 2, 2015

"Some speculate that this adaptability to city life is because coywolves’ dog DNA has made them more tolerant of people and noise..."

"... perhaps counteracting the genetic material from wolves—an animal that dislikes humans. And interbreeding may have helped coywolves urbanise in another way, too, by broadening the animals’ diet. Having versatile tastes is handy for city living. 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."

From an Economist article, "Greater than the sum of its parts/It is rare for a new animal species to emerge in front of scientists’ eyes. But this seems to be happening in eastern North America."

29 comments:

mccullough said...

Maybe the Redskins can change the name to Coywolves

n.n said...

A genetic or behavioral change. It's either a new species or the original species that has adapted to its environment.

traditionalguy said...

More Survival of the fittest species. I smell a Darwinist in the building.

traditionalguy said...

I suggest we arm feral cats with night vision goggles and pepper spray. That should "level the eating them up field."

Fritz said...

mccullough said...
Maybe the Redskins can change the name to Coywolves


I had suggested they be renamed after one member of our local feisty forest fauna, raccoons.

Go 'coons!

madAsHell said...

ManBearPig! Al Gore call your office!!

jimbino said...

I'd love to rent a couple of these coywolves to end my cat problem. It's a felony for a person to kill a cat not his own, but coywolves will stalk cats like cats stalk the songbirds.

Recycle!

Nichevo said...

Must we care about this?

Michael K said...

This is nonsense. Lots of wild animals are adapting to humans. With coyotes, it's only dangerous to cats and small dogs. Mountain lions are also getting comfortable with people. Especially eating them.

Fritz said...

There was one woman killed by coyotes in Canada in 2009, and a toddler in 1989. Nothing much to worry about.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Mitchell

Wince said...

The article kept saying wolves "dislike humans."

More than other wild animals?

BN said...

When I was a kid, 50 years ago, you never saw deer, possums, armadillos, rats, coyotes, wolves, bears... Now they're all over the place. What happened?

Another "sign of the apocalypse" perhaps? Or maybe just "the way it's supposed to be?"

I'm so confused.

BN said...

Squirrels... now, they've always been ubiquitous! All hail the squirrel!

Look! Over there!

BN said...

One thing you did see back then that you don't see any more: box turtles.

I miss those little fucks.

And horny toads too.

Carnifex said...

I'm sorry. I have seen with my own eyes animals do stuff that scientist will announce 10 years later as a breath-taking breakthrough in animal behavior. Do these fucking retards ever go out in the woods and actually look at whats happening? Between this shit, and AGW, i have lost all respect for science. It's all about getting that paycheck baby.

BN said...

"...i have lost all respect for science. It's all about getting that paycheck baby."

plus 2. Or 3. (it's numbers, they're awful hard, y'know.)

Chris N said...

According to the documentary, the coywolf is a specific genetic hybrid that originated in remote Algonquin park in Ontario, where few remaining populations of native wild Eastern wolf (who are able to breed with coyotes) continue to breed with coyotes, and these populations have spread far beyond that area, mostly by way of train-track, stopping off in parks, golf course, suburban woods etc.

Blockier head, longer legs, bigger teeth than a coyote, and they can go after some bigger prey for lack of other options (there was a human death) but threat levels remain low.

A good deal smaller than wolves, more solitary, cunning, non-confrontational, nocturnal and urban scavenger-esque like the coyote.

Observational learners of human behavior, generalists (eats nearly anything), and highly adaptive and fertile.....according to that show.

Not coyotes, not wolves, not dogs, but in many cases, some of each (less domestic dog).

Chris N said...

There is some typical public service didacticism and 'whiff of the bureaucrat' edu-nonsense in the doc: Animals are to be beheld and understood in the Gaia cosmology, so don't go and kill them en masse, neutralize them when they attack livestock, or put them to use in any other way,...etc.

Otherwise, pretty informative.

Chris N said...

Personally, if I were a rancher finding another dead lamb, a pet owner finding what's left of Mr Pickles on the back porch, or perchance I found myself being attacked and eaten...

...I would lie back and think of Gaia..her earthly textbooks, documentaries, and bureaus of wonder.

Fernandinande said...

Michael K said...
Mountain lions are also getting comfortable with people. Especially eating them.


"The current reported attack rate in the U.S. and Canada is ~6 attacks per year, with just under 1 death per year. This number has been constant since at least 1991, with no evidence at all that the rate has changed.

Fritz said...
There was one woman killed by coyotes in Canada in 2009, and a toddler in 1989. Nothing much to worry about.


More coyotes and such means fewer deer:
Deer–vehicle collisions lead to about 200 human deaths and $1.1 billion in property damage every year.

Anonymous said...

If Wolves would breed with garage we'd get smaller wolves with huge assholes.

Not that a wolf would be desperate enough to do what no human female would.

Bruce Hayden said...

I do think that pure bred wolves are also becomng comfortable with humans. A couple weeks ago, a friend was woken by a text from his daughter wth be word "wolves". He jumps in his truck, and drove faster than he should up the mountain, honking all the way, that ha daughter and two 15 year I'd friends were camped on. It worked - the wolves were gone by the time he got up there (which was prudent of the wolves, given the guns he had brought along). Apparently, at one point, wolves on each side of the tent were all pushing the sides in with their snouts. I told him he needs to teach her to shoot one of his ARs, which I think is probably the best weapon for dealing with wolves (esp with their standard 30 round magazines. Much better than the bear spray they had. I do think that t is sgnificant that a pack of wolves would come in within a couple feet of three teenaged girls.

Bruce Hayden said...

Want to apologize for that last post. It was the result of using an iPad with an Otter case. IOS does a pretty bad job guessing my intent from the garbled spelling resulting from a keyboard with less than normal sensitivity. But this is better (for me) than cracking the screen twice on my previous iPad within a single month (a couple weeks after paying almost the cost of a refurbished iPad to repair the screen, the corner collided with the concrete walk, again destroying the screen). Supposedly, you can safely drive over devices in Otter cases, and this one has additional protection on the corners.

jr565 said...

"Some speculate that this adaptability to city life is because coywolves’ dog DNA has made them more tolerant of people and noise..."


"... perhaps counteracting the genetic material from wolves—"

I've noticed that deer become comfortable with humans when you feed them. And similarly, wolves may be uncomfortable with humans simply because they don't generally see humans in their environment.

jr565 said...

If you look at a coyote, a dog, and a wolf its quite clear they are all part of the same family. So then, you'd expect them to be able to interbreed. I don't know what we know about coyote DNA vs. wolf DNA that would explain their eating habits. That's simply conjecture.
However, the scientists answer their own question by saying "perhaps counteracting the genetic material from wolves—an animal that dislikes humans. And interbreeding may have helped coywolves urbanise in another way, too, by broadening the animals’ diet. Having versatile tastes is handy for city living. 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."
Animal adapt to their environments. If a wolf's habitat is being wiped out it moves to where it can find food and breed. If it finds a city and notices that there are plenty of animals it can eat easily then it does so. Its probably less wary of humans because its seen in interactions with humans that they mostly leave it alone, so it can eat the cats it wants, and not get bothered by the humans.
Why do bears look through garbage? Because they wander into a neighborhood and find trash cans that contain food. That's it. Nothing magical about their DNA or variations of DNA due to inbreeding between different strains.
"perhaps counteracting the genetic material from wolves" What does that mean? If a wolf was on the outskirts of a town and saw that there were squirrels romaing around and he could eat the squirrels and not be killed, he would do so.

jr565 said...

There are coydogs. and coywolves, and jackal dog hybrids and coyote jackal hybrids. People who have interbred such animals know of their existence. Don't see why scientists are shocked that a new species exists. If they can breed they can become hybrids. If they can't they don't.

mikee said...

Having lost two cats to non-hybridized coyotes in my suburban neighborhood outside Austin, Texas, I for one note that if animals can breed they aren't separate species so much as separate breeds. I like quibbles.

JAORE said...

The article says, "Purebred coyotes never managed to establish themselves east of the prairies."

Apparently the ones running the stream beds by my house in Alabama at night did not get the memo...

I've seen them. Same animals that lived in my home state of Kansas.

Kansas = prairie
Alabama =/= prairie

robother said...

I can't understand why theses people insist on referring to wolves, gods and coyotes as separate species. If they are capable of interbreeding, doesn't that ipso facto mean they are merely races of the same species? Or has Biology moved on to some different standard for speciation
since the 60s?