By Laura Allen
As predators big and small push quickly into North American cities, biologists are following—and discovering how much we’ve underestimated them. READ MORE
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By Mark Weckel (Re-posted from Center for Humans and Nature's City Creatures Blog
don’t think I ever felt deprived of nature growing up in Brooklyn. To a little kid, New York City’s parks felt huge with endless room for adventure. I am still exploring them today. My block was not the most picturesque of streets, but it was a home for stately, beautiful Norway maples. READ MORE By Javier Monzon Is it considered cannibalism when a coyote eats a dog, but the coyote is actually a coyote-dog hybrid? Maybe the cannibalism question is akin to counting angels on pinheads, but it is true that coyotes - on occasion - eat pets (e.g. small dogs and outside cats) and that coyote-dog hybrids come aplenty. My recent research1 revealed that northeastern coyotes form what is called a “hybrid swarm,” a population of genetically admixed individuals that descended from an initial hybrid generation. All of 425 eastern coyotes that were analyzed across a vast region of the US and Canada had a genetic signal of past hybridization with dogs; the average eastern coyote is actually about 10% dog in its genetic makeup. It gets more complicated. It turns out that wolves are also involved in a canine ménage à trois, and not just one but two species of wolves. So besides being about 10% dog, the average northeastern coyote is also about 13% eastern wolf and 13% western gray wolf. That leaves only 64% of the genome of the northeastern coyote that can be traced to actual coyote ancestry. So what shall we call this chimeric canid? Some rural New Yorkers and New Englanders call it “Coydog.” Some scientists propose to call it “Coywolf.” I think “Coydolf” more appropriately reflect its complex hybrid origin, but still prefer the less creative moniker “Eastern Coyote.” Interestingly, the degree of genetic wolf-likeness is not distributed randomly or uniformly across the Northeast; coyotes inhabiting areas with more deer tend to be more wolf-like. This suggests that hybridization between coyotes and wolves introduced adaptive genetic variation that allowed coyotes to colonize eastern forests and exploit a landscape rich with deer prey. It also demonstrates that adaptation can occur very rapidly and at fine geographic scales. Perhaps, the remarkable adaptability of the Eastern Coyote will allow it to replace motorists as the apex predator that regulates suburban deer populations. Dr. Monzón is a postdoctoral fellow in the Department of Molecular Genetics and Microbiology at Stony Brook University. He recently completed his doctoral work on the population genomics of the eastern coyote and is currently conducting epidemiological studies on the lone star tick. 1 Monzón, J., Kays, R., Dykhuizen, D.E., 2014. Assessment of coyote-wolf-dog admixture using ancestry-informative diagnosticSNPs. Molecular Ecology vol 23: 182–197. By Mark Weckel This past week I joined Sarah Grimke Aucoin, Director of the Urban Park Rangers, and City College professors, Denise Hoffman Brandtand Catherine Seavitt, to discuss Our Animal Nature: Living with Wildlife in New York City. The panel, organized by the U.S Forest Service Urban Field Station, grew out of Denise and Catherine's recent installation "We Live with Animals." Last November, the two explored moments of human-wildlife connection on the streets of NYC through exhibitions, walking tours, and a series of commemorative plaques. Gotham Coyote Project is honored to be the final recipient of the plaque created to mark the several coyotes observed in NYC during the winter of 2010. By our count, three different coyotes were spotted in Manhattan and at least one of them made it to the Hallett in Central Park (the coyote is no longer there). The plaque now sits in our office looking out over Central Park. Poetic, no? So, do coyotes live in Central Park? Generally, no. Coyotes have and will show up from time to time in NYC's most iconic park. But these are visitors and probably won't stay long. Central Park might be big enough to support a few individuals, but it is way too much of a playground for people to be one for coyotes. Thirty-five million people visit Central Park each year, and pretty much all of it is visited by people day and night. We hesitate to make any black and white predictions about an animal that has previously defied the predictions of so many others, but coyotes greatly prefer to minimize their interaction with people and that is very difficult to do in Central Park. We expect coyotes will do well, and are doing well, in some of the less-visited parks in the City. By Mark Weckel
Needless to say, the Gotham Coyote Project is about studying coyotes: where they live, what they eat, how many are there, how they got here, and where they're going. Fun stuff for biologists, but not the whole story. Gotham Coyote stands for so much more. Coyotes in NYC (or Chicago, or Boston or Los Angeles) challenge all of us to face the false divide we tend to construct in our minds between the "human" and "natural" worlds. The question I get all they time about urban coyotes is,"They shouldn't naturally be here, right?" And my circular answer is, "Well, they are here, so I guess it is." The truth is that the scientific community has been a bit slow in confronting this dichotomy between humans and nature. Way back in the early '00s, I can remember reading geography papers criticizing conservationists (and Western society in general) for promoting a human-nature binary. The tide has definitely changed, and the rise in interest in urban ecology is a testament to this shift. As I now like to tell my students, nature is and so are we. I don't romanticize the urban coyote. There will be times when an individual coyote in a particular setting may threaten public safety and health. But the fact that coyotes are here at all, to be studied, to be feared, to be awed, and to be contemplated is amazing. At a time when urban conservation is red hot and we talk about farming rooftops, greening our streets, or restoring wetlands, all with an eye to a more sustainable, resilient, "natural" city, the coyote should be our mascot, our flagship species. Coyotes, as a largely persecuted species, represent resilience, adaptability, and change. And like the process of building a more resilient metropolis, building a more diverse urban ecosystem will require us to accept the idea that the urban coyote is imperfect (it's not the northeastern wolf we once had), and it will require sacrifice (e.g. don't leave your small dog outside if you live near a woodlot). The urban coyote has an uncertain, but hopefully promising future, and it should be our conscience as we raise the banner for green urban future. In future posts, we will use this website to continue to update you on our coyote research, but we will also talk about issues that the urban coyote represents. Coyote sighting in Bridgehampton, LI It's a technical detail, but the eastern coyote has been documented on Long Island before. Several times in Queens since 2000. (And yes, Queens and Brooklyn are both geographically part of LI, even though city residents, including myself, are surprised by that fact). But back to coyotes. The Bridgehampton coyote is a big deal. It is the first time that a coyote has been seen on Suffolk County. This intrepid traveler made it all the way out to the southern fork of LI. Probably the same way most commuters do. . . .by train, following the tracks from its natal home (speculation, of course). We hope that the arrival of this first eastern coyote is met with curiosity and excitement and not fear. There are plenty of statistics that illustrate that coyotes pose no real risk to human health and safety in most situations (heck, we take minors out in the woods in search of them), but I won't belabor this point. I think we should all be a little enamored by the coyote simply by it being here, in NYC and its burbs, at all. The coyote is a symbol of the American west, representing wilderness and the wide open plains. And yet, in the Northeast, where we have done a good job at wiping out wolves and cougars, and paved over forests and filled wetlands, coyotes are deciding to move in despite what we've done with the place. So, for a conservation biologist looking for a success story, I look no farther than the coyote. News 12 Video: http://longisland.news12.com/news/department-of-environmental-conservation-long-island-s-first-coyote-spotted-in-water-mill-1.5611099 |
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