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Coyotes-Wolves-Cougars.blogspot.com

Grizzly bears, black bears, wolves, coyotes, cougars/ mountain lions,bobcats, wolverines, lynx, foxes, fishers and martens are the suite of carnivores that originally inhabited North America after the Pleistocene extinctions. This site invites research, commentary, point/counterpoint on that suite of native animals (predator and prey) that inhabited The Americas circa 1500-at the initial point of European exploration and subsequent colonization. Landscape ecology, journal accounts of explorers and frontiersmen, genetic evaluations of museum animals, peer reviewed 20th and 21st century research on various aspects of our "Wild America" as well as subjective commentary from expert and layman alike. All of the above being revealed and discussed with the underlying goal of one day seeing our Continent rewilded.....Where big enough swaths of open space exist with connective corridors to other large forest, meadow, mountain, valley, prairie, desert and chaparral wildlands.....Thereby enabling all of our historic fauna, including man, to live in a sustainable and healthy environment. - Blogger Rick

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Thursday, September 27, 2012

Biologist and CHICAGO URBAN COYOTE STUDY LEADER Stan Gehrt back in the news reaffirming that Coyotes are monogamous and mate for life............"Coy­otes’ loy­al­ty may be a key to their suc­cess in ur­ban ar­eas"..... "Not only is a fe­male coy­ote nat­u­rally ca­pa­ble of pro­duc­ing large lit­ters of young dur­ing times of plen­ty, 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. “But the male spends just as much time help­ing to raise those pups as the fe­male does.”

Street coyotes more faithful than people, study suggests

                           Courtesy of Ohio State University
and
World Science staff
 
Coy­otes liv­ing in ur­ban areas nev­er stray from their mates—they stay to­geth­er till death do them part, ac­cord­ing to a new stu­dy.

Sci­en­tists say 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 metro­pol­is­es.





 
  Even though the coy­otes live in dense­ly packed pop­ula­t­ions with plen­t­iful of food, con­di­tions that of­ten lead some oth­er mem­bers of the dog family to stray from their nor­mal mo­nog­a­my, coyotes do not stray.

“I was sur­prised we did­n’t find any cheat­ing,” said study co-au­thor Stan Gehrt, a wild­life ecol­o­gist at Ohio State. “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,” he added.

The re­search ap­pears in a re­cent is­sue of The Jour­nal of Mam­mal­o­gy.

Coy­otes’ loy­al­ty may be a key to their suc­cess in ur­ban ar­eas, Gehrt said. Not only is a fe­male coy­ote nat­u­rally ca­pa­ble of pro­duc­ing large lit­ters of young dur­ing times of plen­ty, 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. “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 great­er Chi­ca­go—home to about 9 mil­lion peo­ple and 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. “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.

The sci­en­tists used harm­less traps to catch adult coy­otes for the stu­dy, where­as pups were dug from their dens and held by hand. Small blood and tis­sue sam­ples were tak­en. The adults, which were an­es­the­tized, al­so were fit­ted with ra­di­o col­lars to track them. Af­ter­ward, all the coy­otes were re­leased where they were caught. Hen­nessy used ge­net­ic tech­niques in the lab to test the an­i­mals’ DNA and de­ter­mine their family trees.

A male coy­ote, for his part, prac­tices dil­i­gent mate guard­ing—keep­ing oth­er males away from his mate. Dur­ing es­trus, the time when the fe­male can be­come preg­nant, the pair spends all their time to­geth­er—running, find­ing food, mark­ing their ter­ri­to­ry, the sci­en­tists said.

“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.
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