From Science Daily:
Coyotes living in cities don’t ever stray from their mates, and stay with each other till death do them part, according to a new study.
The finding sheds light on why the North American cousin of the dog and wolf, which is originally native to deserts and plains, is thriving today in urban areas.
Scientists with Ohio State University who genetically sampled 236 coyotes in the Chicago area over a six-year period found no evidence of polygamy — of the animals having more than one mate — nor of one mate ever leaving another while the other was still alive.
This was even though the coyotes exist in high population densities and have plenty of food to eat, which are conditions that often lead other dog family members, such as some fox species, to stray from their normal monogamy.
To cat around, as it were.
“I was surprised we didn’t find any cheating going on,” said study co-author Stan Gehrt, a wildlife ecologist with Ohio State’s School of Environment and Natural Resources. “Even with all the opportunities for the coyotes to philander, they really don’t.
“In contrast to studies of other presumably monogamous species that were later found to be cheating, such as arctic foxes and mountain bluebirds, we found incredible loyalty to partners in the study population.”
The study appears in a recent issue of The Journal of Mammalogy.
The loyalty of coyotes to their mates may be a key to their success in urban areas, according to Gehrt.
Not only does a female coyote have the natural ability to produce large litters of young during times of abundance, such as when living in food-rich cities, she has a faithful partner to help raise them all.
“If the female were to try to raise those large litters by herself, she wouldn’t be able to do it,” said Gehrt, who holds appointments with the university’s Ohio Agricultural Research and Development Center and Ohio State University Extension. “But the male spends just as much time helping to raise those pups as the female does.”
Unlike the males of polygamous species, a male coyote “knows that every one of those pups is his offspring” and has a clear genetic stake in helping them survive, Gehrt said.
The research was done in Cook, Kane, DuPage and McHenry counties in northeast Illinois. All are in greater Chicago, which is home to about 9 million people and is the third-largest metropolitan area in the U.S.
It’s also home to an estimated 1,000 to 2,000 coyotes. Gehrt has previously said he “couldn’t find an area in Chicago where there weren’t coyotes.”
“You’ve got lots of coyotes in this landscape,” said senior author Cecilia Hennessy, who conducted the study as a master’s degree advisee of Gehrt and is now a doctoral student at Purdue University in Indiana. “You’ve got territories that abut each other. And coyotes can make long-distance forays. So you’d think, based on previous investigations of dog behavior, that cheating would be likely.
“But to find nothing, absolutely nothing, no evidence whatsoever of anything that wasn’t monogamy, I was very surprised by that,” she said.
The finding came through a wider study of Chicago-area coyotes that Gehrt has led since 2000. As the largest study ever on urban coyotes, it’s a long-term effort to understand the animals’ population ecology, how they adapt to urban life and how to reduce their conflicts with people.
“A powerful part of the new paper is that we have long-term field work, behavior observations, to accompany Cecilia’s genetic work,” Gehrt said. “So many genetic studies only analyze samples but know very little about their subjects, whereas we follow these individuals nearly every day and often to the completion of their lives. It’s a nice mesh of lab and field work.”
The scientists used live traps — either padded foothold traps or non-choking neck snares — to catch the coyotes for the study, although pups were simply dug from their dens and held by hand. Small blood and tissue samples were taken from all the animals. The adults, which were anesthetized, also were fitted with radio-collars for tracking their movements and ranges. Afterward, all the coyotes were released where they were caught.
Later, Hennessy, who previously was a plant genetics technician and biology major at the University of Cincinnati, used genetic techniques in the lab to test the animals’ DNA and determine their family trees.
Coyotes maintain monogamy through long-term pair bonding, a term meaning an animal stays with the same mate for more than one breeding season, and sometimes for many.
A male coyote, for his part, practices diligent mate guarding — keeping other males away from the female.
During estrus, which is the time when the female can become pregnant, the pair “will spend all their time together — running, finding food, marking their territory. They’ll always be right at each other’s side.”
“We’ve been able to follow some of these alpha pairs through time, and we’ve had some of them stay together for up to 10 years,” Gehrt said. “They separate only upon the death of one of the individuals, so they truly adhere to that philosophy, ‘Till death do us part,’ ” Hennessy said.
This finding also suggests why coyotes have not become inundated with domestic dog genes.
It’s true that coyotes and wolves and dogs and coyotes have mated in the wild, and there are definite domestic dog and wolf genes in coyote populations.
However, coyotes remain genetically distinct as a species. They may have a bit of wolf or dog in them, but they are still predominantly coyote.
I have never heard of any coyote Casanovas. In wolves, the Casanova strategy for reproduction is not necessarily commonplace, but it does exist. Certain male wolves simply do not find a mate with whom they form a pair bond. Instead, they roam around the edges of the territories of established packs and mate with the maturing daughters of the mated pair. Most wolf packs have a single mated pair, and it is usually the case that most of the other wolves in the pack are their maturing daughters. Normally, only the litters from the female belonging to the mated pair get to survive, but there are cases in which packs allow puppies from these females to survive. In Yellowstone, it is commonplace for packs to have two or three litters from two or three different females.
And all these extra litters are sired by wolves employing this Casanova strategy.
It may be that the only way dog genes are filtering into the coyote population is that large male dogs are dominating pair-bonded male coyote so they can mate with his female.
Or maybe female coyotes seek the attention of dogs before they pair bond with a male coyote.
It appears that monogamy in coyotes is unusually strong, and it may be a good reason why people have never been able to domesticate them– with the possible exception of the Hare Indian dog. It’s pretty hard to selectively breed from an animal that won’t change mates as they are given to them. It’s true that we’ve domesticated budgerigars and pigeons, but they are much more flexible in their monogamy.
Monogamy– or at least, pair-bonding– is almost universal in dog species. Domestic dogs are the only ones that really don’t form them– although there are cases of them doing so.
But it has always been the traditional caveat to say that while wild dogs do form pair bonds, it’s not been confirmed if they are truly monogamous. Many bird species that raise their young as a bonded pair often cheat their mates. It’s not unusual for clutches to have more than one father.
In coyotes, having more than one father per litter is an extreme exception.
They truly are monogamous within their bonded pairs.
Two thoughts ion this post Scottie:
1) I’d really like to know how long coyotes have been living in Chicagoland, as I remember seeing what was indubitably a coyote in the city when I was a kid in the ’50s.
2) Is it likely that young male coyotes, before they form a permanent pair bond might cat around w/ domestic dog bitches?
It has to be females. Otherwise, you’re getting coyote genes into dogs, and any coydog pups born to a domestic bitch would be euthanized or brought up as pet dogs.
And they wouldn’t be able to contribute to wild coyotes.
There are some coyotes with dog mtDNA, but I highly suspect that these derive from coydogs that were bred in captivity and then released into the wild.
This blows my mind. I can’t think of a single other instance of total monogamy in a species – I wonder if this is location specific.
It might be, but for a mammal, even ones that pair-bond, having this sort of monogamy in any instance is very strange.
Obviously, it would be interesting if similar studies were to be done at other locations and get similar results.
There’s a book, “God’s Dog”, I forget the author offhand but I have the book here in my stacks somewhere. She did some long-term field studies of coyotes, both rural and urban. The overall level of monogamy she found was very high. It’s not a recent book but is very informative and well-illustrated with photographs. Some of the information is dated in light of recent knowledge (for instance, the “New Hampshire Canid”, as it was called then, is now the Eastern Coyote), but it’s a very good read.
I believe it was Hope Ryden.
She also wrote a book about beavers that was pretty good.
Author’s name is Hope Ryden. She has also done long-term field studies of the wild (well, feral) mustangs of the American West.
Oh Scottie, I did not see your reply. The coyote book is very good. Her respect and admiration for the coyotes was very unusual for the time.
if this is true and the “red wolf” is a mix, is it a mix because of captivity or is it a mix due to some unusual circumstance? Do red wolves practice the strict monogamy of coyotes or the more loose system of wolves? Incidentally, the results might well be due to pack structure. Wolves generally have packs of 5 + animals. It’s usual for the leaders to be the parents of the subordinates or else closely related. Consequently, an outside breeder for any litters not by the alpha pair would be better genetically if it WERE by a ”Casanova” ala “black wolf”. On the other hand, at least in the West, coyotes form pairs, with pretty loose associations with their offspring, who generally form their own packs by the time they are 3 – hence there is no genetic gain for an outside breeder and a great deal of possible negative, given the need for both pairs to help raise the litter.
[…] Now, coyotes apparently have very strict monogamy, even in urban settings. […]