As a response to one of the comments I received today, I’m going to show you photos of an Eastern coyote from upstate New York and a red wolf. The two animals are virtually identical, and they have almost the same amount of coyote ancestry.
Why one is an endangered species and the other something that can be killed at virtually any time of the year is one of those little puzzles that one ought to think about more carefully.
Eastern coyote from New York state (Canis latrans):
Red wolf (supposed Canis rufus):
If you saw these two animals running around in the woods, you would think they were the same species.
And they are!
And they have very similar sizes. Eastern coyotes vary from 25 to 70 pounds, and red wolves vary from 40 to 80 pounds.
There is a definite overlap in size.
And there is also an ecological overlap. Northeastern coyotes are efficient predators of deer, as are red wolves.
Both of these animals derive from recent introgression of wolf genes into coyotes populations. Red wolves are 76 percent coyote on average, and Eastern coyotes in New York State average 82 percent coyote.
The red wolf is nothing more than a fancy “breed” of coyote that was trapped out of East Texas and Louisiana in the 1970’s and then released into reserves in the Southeast. These reserves spend most of their red wolf management time trapping out coyotes, which readily breed with red wolves. There is no species barrier between red wolves and Eastern coyotes.
Why would there be?
Now, there are species barriers that prevent frequent between coyotes and wolves and dogs. If there weren’t, coyotes would have become almost entirely dog in ancestry by now. They hybridize at the margins.
Red wolves will mate with coyotes as readily as they’ll mate with each other.
This is why this whole thing makes no sense to me.
The genetic evidence shows that red wolves are as much coyote as coyotes roaming freely in the Eastern US.
But the coyote is a common and often persecuted species.
And the red wolf is a highly endangered species!
There is something wrong with that.
See related posts:
I am glad you have a growing readership. I hope they pay attention to you!
This kind of article should represent the foundation for a changing type of thinking about endangered species, hybrid mixes – and dog breeds, for that matter. Lumping and/or splitting as the times require it. That is what nature does.
The dna in a dog breed is not of sacred purity and unchanging over time – quite the opposite! – and trying to purify breeds more, let alone keep breeds ‘pure’ represents a type of thinking from an era when people had read Darwin, and were influenced by his cousin, but did not yet understand how evoluton worked because they hadn’t incorported Mendalian principles of how species both remain the same and change, through inherited genes. Those not inherited are just as important to the race, breed, species, whatever you want to call it as the ones that are inherited! But the AKC idea of purification still means to remove the dogs that carry undesirable traits from the gene pool.
Therefore breeders trying to isolate and remove genetic expressions from dog breeds by artificial selection, have had a sorcerer’s apprentice outcome. And still, purebreeders are afraid to mix or add blood. They freak out at the idea as much as southerners freaked out at the idea of people with “one drop” of African blood marrying their daughters! Yet are so hidebound to the kind of doggy racism ‘purification’ means, they are AFRAID to outcross at all, even to a closely related breed.
Maybe all breeders of registered dogs, cats, horses, should be required to take a genetics course with a strong population genetics component before being allowed to breed at all, ever!!! The current mentoring system at the world’s KC’s mandates the apprentice who only co-owns the dogs, cannot deviate from orthodoxy or he/she will be stripped of their position in that world, not to mention the dogs. You can’t even talk to most akc breeders about these things at all; they absolutely freak out.
I guessed right.
But, what’s with the shooting of coyotes in NY? I’ve heard they tie out small dogs to lure them in. Just for the “fun” of blowing away coyotes. What kind of sport is that?
Of course we have to control the population – except that this happens in the Adirondack Mts, where there is lots of space and few lambie pies. Besides which, dogs can be used to fend off coyotes, where necessary.
We have coyotes here. I have seen only 2 of them in about 15 years. They really aren’t a problem.
They shoot coyotes to help control their numbers. Coyotes do have some effect on deer numbers, although this is just now being teased out.
Good, we need something to keep Whitetail numbers w/in bounds. The Whitetail is not traditionally found in large herds, but around here, you can see herds of 2 dozen or more. Their population, like that of the humans who are building in their habitat, exceeds the carrying weight of the land by way too much. In these numbers they’re terribly destructive, both w/in the remaining scraps of forest, where they destroy tree seedlings and native undergrowth, and in the suburban “edge’ ecosystem most of us perpetuate. We definitely need an apex predator like the Eastern Coyote to keep their numbers w/in bounds.
I’m afraid that this is a lesson that the officials in ID are gonna have to learn all over again as they “cull” the wolves there to increase the Elk herd for hunters (last I heard they’ve shot 400 of the estimated 800 wolves there in the past year.) With wolf predation the forest ecosystems in ID were recovering from the previous over-browsing by Elk. It won’t take long for it to go back to the way it was.
I have a few questions (actually a slew): were coyotes present in Pre-Columbian Eastern United States? If so, is it most likely the “wolves” that settlers were seeing were, in fact, these coyote x wolf hybrids? If coyotes were always present in the East, then is it possible the “recent” adaptations for hunting deer may not be so recent? It would seem that if coyotes were always present, they should have had these deer hunting adaptations in the past as well. And it’s obvious some kind of Canid was present during Pre-Columbian times – be it a wolf or a coyote.
Also, are there pure coyotes in the East? Obviously there are hybrids, but what about pure coyotes? If there are not, does that mean that the hybrid population is self sustaining without breeding back to the parent populations? If this is indeed happening, at what point does this become a new species? Could this new species be Canis rufus, thus making the Eastern Coyote = Red Wolf (Canis rufus), and taking this species off the Endangered Species List?
I’m very interested in this, and I’ve been following your posts on this subject for some time now. Thanks for any info you can provide, and thank you for your continued posts on this topic.
I’ve thought about all of these questions/
The evidence for coyotes in the East before Columbus is really good:
John Smith wrote of “wolues” that were “not much bigger than English foxes” in the environs around Jamestown:
https://retrieverman.wordpress.com/2011/06/01/is-this-an-account-of-eastern-coyotes-in-early-virginia/
Henry Wharton Shoemaker, a naturalist, conservationist, and folklorist in the mountains of Pennsylvania in the early 1900’s, included a discussion of a “small brown wolf.” Thissmall brown wolf had a barking howl that was very similar to the coyote, and the only major difference was the animal had smaller ears than a coyote. BTW, extant red wolves howl like coyotes, not wolves. (The black wolf type that Shoemaker describes is really interesting. Bartram saw this exact same animal in Florida, which he called Canis niger.
That SNP study by vonHold found that virtually all coyotes from the east had at least some dog and wolf ancestry. They are overwhelmingly coyote in ancestry, but they usually have some wolf and dog mixed in. My guess is that any pure coyotes in the East would have have been introduced by people from the Western states.
A deer-hunting, larger coyote is something that did exist in North America. During the Pleistocene, there were large coyotes, and before them, there were 70 pound Canids, often classified as wolves, such as Canis edwardii. Edwardii is sometimes suggested as the red wolf or its ancestor, but in all likelihood it was nothing more than a wolf-like form that evolved from the coyote lineage.
This sort of coyote is evolving from the Western coyote lineage.
I don’t know if we can call it a new species or not. Coyotes vary quite a bit, too. As you go south through Mexico into Central America, coyotes are in the 15-pound range. In Costa Rica, they roam the beaches and eat sea turtle eggs during the olive ridley arribadas.
I have a post or two in the works on the history of the term “red wolf.” It was first referred to by Audubon and John Bachman, and they didn’t think it was a unique species. They noted it was nothing more than a color phase of wolves in East Texas, where gray and black ones were also found.
“..were coyotes present in Pre-Columbian Eastern United States?”
In what context? As a general rule, not as such. Too many Gray Wolves (C. lupus) in the middle part of that region. In the more Northern part closer to Canada, the Eastern Wolf – now considered to have been a separate species – may also have been present as well. But there is no evidence of actual coyotes.
“…is it most likely the “wolves” that settlers were seeing were, in fact, these coyote x wolf hybrids?”
If you are talking about that part of the region that later became the NorthEastern US, the answer is maybe but not likely. Settlers from the British Isles (and probably Holland as well) were unlikely to have ever seen a Gray Wolf and could be mistaken in their description, In fact, it’s likely that at least some of the animals they encountered were actually what is now classified as the Eastern Wolf (Canis lycaon).
On the other hand, settlers from Spain, France and Sweden could likely have been familiar with the Gray Wolf. There were wolves in France until the 1930’s, and of course Spain and Sweden have always had them. So I think we can credit their descriptions that these were actually gray wolves., and there is no evidence to think otherwise.
Don’t forget that bison and elk (wapiti) were widespread in those days, so a large predator loike a Gray Wolf would have had a selection advantage over a much smaller predator like a coyote.
Also, there is no historical evidence of wolves OR coyotes on the Atlantic Coastal Plain south of what is now Virginia
You’re actually quite wrong.
I posted several historical links in the comments that do show coyotes were in the East. John Smith encountered very small wolves at Jamestown, and every other animal described in his account matches a known animal, except for that little wolf. It has to be a coyote. Shoemaker wrote of small brown wolves in Pennsylvania. His small brown wolf howled like a coyote, and it was about the same size as a coyote.
I shall post all of this material soon, but Bartram came across wolves regularly in Florida.
You’re right about elk and bison, which means that the wolves in the East would have to have been larger than what’s called a wolf.
You do know there are coyotes in the West and wolves in the West, right?
What you’re going to say is that Bartram saw black red wolf.
Here’s the thing. No one has provided any conclusive proof that what we’re calling a red wolf now is the same thing as the black wolf of Florida.
Black coloration in wolves likely originated in domestic dogs, and in the Southeast, the Indian dogs were usually much smaller than wolves, with one notable exception. Bartram came across a large black dog that looked like a wolf guarding Seminole ponies.
I think these black wolves were part of a subspecies of Canis lupus that lived in the region. It’s now entirely extinct.
The study that looked at the genome largely debunked much of what you’re writing. I will link to the full study in an upcoming post. There were not two species of wolf in North America. There are only wolves and coyotes, and they exchange genes at certain times.
The thing we’re calling the red wolf now may not even be related to them.
Thank you for replying.
As far as the historical sources go, you always have to consider the context of those sources and their reliability within that context.
John Smith – or any other Jamestown settler – certainly never saw a wolf in England. It’s very unlikely he or they ever saw a wolf anywhere else, either.. So it’s hard to credit their descriptions. Considering what we know of the Native American cultures of the area, it is much more likely that the “small wolves” of Smith were hybrids of wolves with Native American dogs, rather than coyotes or wolf-coyotes.
As for Shoemaker, consider this. It’s almost a certainty that his “black wolves” were actually wolf-dog hybrids, as I think you will admit. However, it is significant that he did NOT discuss that possibility or even consider it . So what can we make of his “small brown wolves?” Not very much, I’m afraid. They were what they were, and that’s all we can say.
On the other hand, the early Spanish and French arrivals may well have known wolves in their native countries, so we can credit that they knew what animals they were seeing. . When the Spanish first encountered coyotes – which they did very early on in Western North America but never as far as we know in what became the Southeastern US – they knew that they were encountering something entirely different which is why they adopted the Nahuatl word for them.
When we examine the Native American cultures of what later became the original thirten colonies, it is clear that most of those cultures knew the wolf – and the dog, of course – very well. They did NOT know the coyote. On the other side, Native American cultures of the Western US – where we KNOW the coyote and wolf coexisted for thousands of years — clearly knew and DIFFERENTIATED BETWEEN the wolf and the coyote. Can we say that the Eastern Native Americans couldn’t tell the difference? I don’t think so.
The problem with genome studies of living animals is that they can’t take the historical or fossil records into account. To get the complete story, you have to look at all the evidence.
I’m not talking about the so-called “red wolf”. I don’t think that animal even existed in the Southeast in pre-Columbian times.. The Spanish never mention it and the Native Americans apparently didn’t know about it.
If you read Smith’s writing, every detail aligns with a species we know today. That small wolf makes no sense, unless you consider it to be a coyote. A very big English fox is the same size as a coyote bitch. There are no wolves that meet that definition in North America. John Smith would have known what a wolf was. He was a soldier in Wallachia, fighting against the Ottomans for the Hapsburg crown. He was eventually captured by the Ottomans and sold as a slave in Constantinople. He later escaped when taken to Crimea (in the Ukraine) and ran to Moscow, the to the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth before escaping back to England. Wolves are found in every one of those places, so he would have known what a wolf was.
We have coyote remains that date to the Pleistocene in West Virginia. The Pleistocene isn’t the seventeenth century. But then we have all this genetic data of wolves with coyote mtDNA in Eastern North America that date to 300-500 years before Columbus. Both wolves and coyotes disperse over great distances when they hit sexual maturity, but they could have spread into the East in limited enough numbers.
I’m not saying coyotes were common in the East. I think the settlers just killed off all the wolves without trying to know what they were, so we don’t have a good record. The Indians were largely killed off, too, and we don’t have the best record of what they called things, except for some special cases.
All black wolves likely derive from some level of hybridizing with dogs. I don’t deny that, but Shoemaker winds up conflating a bunch of black wolves in the text. Some are like the black wolves he lines up in the beginning, and others are black wolves that are like the large gray wolves.
I know what I’m saying is controversial, but it’s not been explored because almost every wolf expert says that Smith was talking about the “red wolf,” even though now we know it’s a fictional animal. No red wolf is that size.
It makes no sense to me why the coyote never lived in the East. If you say it’s wolf persecution, then why do they live in the West?
Shoemaker thought the small brown wolf was the coyote. I think this is still possibility that ought to be explored.
We need more evidence than these records, but they do seem to point to something anomalous in how we typically think of the historical biogeography of wolves and coyotes.
Here in R I coyotes will take fawns to yearlings,and injured adults (lotta broken legs from auto strikes),but we are up to our eyeballs in deer . plenty for coyotes ,cars, and hunters.
Here on British tv we were recently shown a wonderful programme made by American naturalists about wolves now gradually reentering the western USA from Canada via the Cascade mountains. Great coverage often using cameras attached to trees. Unfortunately these pioneer wolves are having to run the gauntlet of some mindless individuals from the school of thought which says “the only good wolf is a dead one” and sadly the female of this pioneer family was killed by one of these idiots. It was so sad to see film of the father and two surviving sons of the family howling in despair from a ridge.
Fortunately it seems that other wolf families are reintroducing themselves more successfully and reportedly one of them has already made it down as far as northern California.
It seems that the experimental reintroduction of wolves back to Yellowstone has shown the benefit to vegetation (the grass is allowed to grow longer without being overeaten by deer) and therefore the whole ecossystem simply because the deer population is being controlled in the natural way by these wolves.
There are too many deer in the British Isles and it would be great if we could have wolves reintroduced here to restore a balance, but there are probably too many people and not enough land for that to work. The only wild canids we have are the red foxes of course, but at least this species is no longer being hunted and it is even cohabiting with us in the heart of cities. The banning of fox hunting a few years ago shows we are celebrating the existence of foxes rather than designating them as “vermin” as was formerly the case. We just don’t have enough wildflife in these islands sadly!
On visits to California it was amazing to hear coyotes howling in the evening time. I cannot understand why Americans in this 21st century are still so disrespectful of these wonderful creatures – and of the many other examples of their fauna they think are fair game for all those guns their stupid laws allow them to own, the rationed killing of black bears for example. No excuse, no reason for it anymore.
Black bears, I know from experience, are actually pretty tasty. If the black bear has been foraging mostly on berries and nuts, they can taste like very fine pork– provided it’s cooked properly!
Coyotes get killed mainly for killing livestock. They are much worse offenders than wolves. Using llamas, donkeys, and guard dogs reduce losses, but sometimes they have to be killed for that reason.
Are you sure you’re a member of the Conservative Party? LOL.
They are not in trouble at all. They can have a sustainable hunt. Perhaps you are mixing the Polar Bear or Grizzly Bear with the Black Bear? Grizzlies do not rebound as quickly as the Blacks do.
“British Columbia’s black bear population is currently at an historic high. The Wildlife Branch estimates that 120,000 to 160,000 black bears live in British Columbia, having increased from around 80,000 in 1870. (Demarchi 1999). This is nearly 30% of the 443,000 black bears in the Canadian population and approximately 15% of the 803,000 black bears in the North American population (Samuel and Jackson 2000).
The greater ability of black bears to adapt to human activities compared to that of grizzly bears has contributed to their success. Black bears have been trapped and hunted continuously by non-natives for nearly 200 years and by First Nations peoples for uncounted generations, yet populations persist in most areas. Black bears in some parts of the province may experience loss of forage as second-growth forests shade out berry producing plants and as large logs, root boles and stumps are lost for denning. These factors may lead to increased cannibalism and some localized population declines (Davis and Harestad 1996)”
In fact, the only threat to their existence is encroaching farm-lands:
“Historically, black bears occupied most of North America except the treeless barrens of northern Canada and the desert regions of the southwestern United States and Mexico (Seton 1929). In Canada, black bears occupy 85% of their historic range (Kolenosky and Strathearn 1987). They have been displaced from the southern farmlands of Alberta, Saskatchewan and Manitoba. In the United States, black bears have lost habitat wherever hardwood forests have been eliminated.”
Source: http://www.bearsinbc.com/pages/01black/01population.html
Perhaps, Britain would had kept their large predators if the forests were not decimated the way it was.
Well, foxes in the UK are still being shot and trapped, mostly by farmers. They are not a protected species. Just not hunted with dogs.
The urban fox is a recent phenomenon. Foxes have ventured into urban areas for years – but now people have discovered that they like them, and encourage them, and feed them, and even create dens for them. Foxes, of course, do really well as urban scavengers, and I wonder if this is the future for them?
Elizabeth
Funny you should mention the Conservative party, retrieverman, as I was walking on the prime ministerial estate at Chequers only this afternoon – yes honestly – and came across a beautiful large male fox – one that was in rather finer condition than the urban foxes currently being filmed for tv,- walking slowly across a field – until he sensed me and my shih tzu that is – when he promptly legged it into the trees. LOL
Incidentally, retrieverman, I don’t necessarily question your information on the subject, but tell me – how can the livestock killing efficiency of wolves and coyotes be compared sixty years after the grey wolf was effectively banished from below the 49th parallel?
Wolves existed in Minnesota in large numbers for decades before they came back elsewhere. Canada has lots of farming and ranching in wolf country. Lots of studies have happened on these wolves over the years, so we know that they aren’t a major livestock predator.
Coyotes, on the other hand, have proven to be major predators of livestock. We have been killing coyotes in so many different ways, but all they’ve done is laugh at us and continue to increase in number.
Minnesota never lost its wolves. It was the only place in the Lower 48 that never lost them, though there were always rumors of them in Wyoming, Idaho, and Montana.
First off, as humans are becoming more urbanized in Canada, our black bear population is soaring. As hunting becomes increasingly more and more unfavourable among urbanites, the more bear attacks we have in the province of British Columbia.
They are hardly endangered. We have the highest population density of bears and cougars than anywhere else in North America. Same can be said about wolves.
Wolves seldom attack livestock here in Canada, however coyotes are huge issues to be concerned about during calving seasons. If they are not controlled, ranchers would go bankrupt. To counter this, many ranches will employ sharpshooters during this two week period to kill any coyote who attempt to go near the herd.
If as I understand it the only significant wolf/coyote proximity to livestock in living memory has been that of coyotes in the USA then it cannot be easy to state confidently which is potentially the more dangerous to livestock overall – the wolf or the coyote – although I don’t doubt that the coyote, as by far the more numerous of the two canids, will SEEM to be the worst livestock killer.
Coyotes are always much more numerous, whether you have wolves or not. They breed at earlier ages. They are also a lot more bold than wolves. They have a better sense of hearing, so they can take risks that wolves might not.
The studies on wolves is that they are not a significant predator of livestock.
But they are always talking about predation from coyotes.
Wolves also have an issue where they don’t normally target prey species that they didn’t grow up eating. So if wolves didn’t eat beef or lamb, they often won’t even touch a cow or sheep.
Coyotes don’t seem to have that issue.
Yeah, but you’re ignoring Minnesota, which has never lost its wolves.
They have been studying wolves in that agricultural state for decades.
coyote fossils have been discovered in eastern Canada and Pennsylvania(Idont remember where I read that