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.comment on this story, or send it to a friend