Well, the coyotes that I've seen around urban centers are consistantly larger and healthier than their kin out in more wild unsettled areas.

I suspect that plentiful cat and poodle meat has something to do with the phenomenon.

It's 10:00 pm......do you know where your pet is?

Brad,
I forget where you live. Eastern coyotes are bigger then western ones. They're evolving to fill the wolf niche which is empty in the east.

Michael, that seems like pretty quick evolution . How long has this wolf niche been empty?

The article only talks about average weight (20-40 lbs.) Not knowing the standard deviation in Coyote weight it's hard for me to say if there is anything to infer from this sunrise encounter. Now, if this is a regular encounter, and assuming it's not the same big coyote every time then...

I'm no wild canid expert, but I think you may be taking the term "evolution" too narrowly. Eastern coyotes are (almost certainly) not speciating; however, wolves have been absent for well over 100 years throughout most of their eastern range. Moving into a niche where animals 2-4 times their "average" size once predated, the coyotes have ample opportunity to push their natural envelope of size. Obvious comparison - humans haven't evolved as such over the last 200 years, but advances in health have made for a much larger (physically) population. Coyotes are subject to a bit more selection than humans, so that population may in fact be trending larger. But the bottom line is that a coyote in Allegheny Nat'l Forest has opportunities its scrawny Plains ancestors could only dream of.

Brad

We both are married, but I do love you. When you write about nature you are even more wonderful than usual.

Ann

An average size coyote put my 95 lb. ridgeback in the animal hospital with multiple wounds a while back. A 60lb. coyote is a scary thought. Where do you live? Could it have been a wolf? One was recently found here in Madison, wi., about 200 miles south of its home territory.

Apparently cross-breeding between dogs and coyotes doesn't work very well, because the pups tend to get born at the wrong time of year and don't survive well. (Or so I've heard.)

My own dog, an alaskan malamute, will run out to play with the coyotes at my parent's farm in upstate NY. I worried at first, but he's very big so they don't seem to bother him. Still, kind of strange...

It's been my experience (in Southern California and now up here in Northern California) that urban coyotes tend to average quite a bit larger than 20-40 pounds. Like EA said, probably all that cat and dog meat.

My German Shepherd Dog, Oka, and I recently ran across a pack above Cupertino one morning recently (6 or 7 coyotes), and one of them was at least 50 pounds, if not more. But none of them seemed to want to try conclusions with a human and a 90-pound GSD. As far as Oka was concerned, they were just dogs, and he was not as interested in them as he is in deer or rabbits.

Jroth, I'm no expert either, but why wouldn't these ampler Allegheny opportunities express themselves as a denser population of coyotes per square mile (higher rate of reproduction or survival or something) rather than as a markedly increased volume of flesh per coyote?

I knew it. Your wild American canines would have to be bigger than our foxes. At home, I heard more loud screeching outside late last night so go out to investigate and there is a young fox hurriedly backing out of a hedge some 20 yards down the road making an awesome noise.

Just what had prompted this retreat was unseen. Anyway, after calming down and shaking itself, the fox went back into the hedge from whence it had come. The night was quiet again. This evening I go out for a late shop walking past the same hedge and a little further along there is a young fox - maybe the same one or a sibling - rooting in the hedge on the opposite side of the road. It looks up as I walk past and sees me but decides to go back to rooting with barely a hesitation.

This is urban London now but a bricked-up sandstone cave a few hundred yards away was found, decades back, to have evidence of human habitation going back to the middle stone age, according to The London Encyclopaedia. A couple of summers ago the district library had a pin-up display about a local archeological digout of the foundations of a substantial Roman villa in the neighbourhood. The place name is Saxon. Five miles away, seven Saxon kings were crowned before the Norman Conquest in 1066. The local parish church is part Norman. About four miles away, Henry VIII had a sumptuous palace built, which he named Nonsuch to proclaim its unique character. Sadly, only a few ruins remain now.

I guess foxes and humans were cohabiting in this same neighbourhood for several millennia before the Romans arrived. That gives a proper sense of territory and history.

According to an article I read in New Jersey Magazine, the eastern coyote is markedly larger than its western cousin. The article quoted an expert who spreculated that there may have been wolf/coyote crossbreeding during the migration accross Canada from west to east.

PS: According to the New York Times, the cougar is also migrating eastward, drawn by our endless supply of white-tailed deer.

Let us consider another species about which most of us know more from personal experience than we do about coyotes. Housecats survive in the wild, sometimes. Most of them get really skinny. When the survive long enough to breed, their offspring seem, to my naive eye, to be less skinny, but framed smaller. They don't need Darwinian adaptation to get smaller. The availability of food, either to mom or early in life, is enough to do the trick. Wthe frame of a well fed critter would grow larger than that of one less well fed is, I think, beyond dispute. Look at Japan since WWII, in which the average Japanese soldier was under 5 feet tall, as I understand. Whether their would be some increase in density of population is harder to know. India and China did well in maintaining some pretty dense populations on inadequate diets for a very long time. It is pretty obvious that fertility and longevity suffer with a poor diet, but not enough to keep the niche from filling up.

Do coyote-dog mixes not do well? I had heard that fox populations in some areas were threatened by dillution due to the spread of coyotes, and there are persistent urban legends about dog-wolf and dog-coyote mixes being terribly dangerous because of dogs' reputed lack of fear of humans. I have not one stitch of documentation for these inbreeding notions.

Brad: did I miss something? Where did you spot your coyote? Was it in the Eastern U.S.?
Near our place in SW Massachusetts there have been reports of "wolves" being sighted, eating pets, etc., which are probably more likely to be large coyotes. I think that the "standards" for coyote size ARE based on the Western type, and that for some reason, those that have migrated East run larger than the old averages (?? cold-winter adapation?). Anyway, if they are feasting on venison, they are, in our area anyway, going to get to be the size of Dire Wolves: Berkshires are overrun with deer - and they are only going to fet more numerous.

Brad: did I miss something? Where did you spot your coyote? Was it in the Eastern U.S.?
Near our place in SW Massachusetts there have been reports of "wolves" being sighted, eating pets, etc., which are probably more likely to be large coyotes. I think that the "standards" for coyote size ARE based on the Western type, and that for some reason, those that have migrated East run larger than the old averages (?? cold-winter adapation?). Anyway, if they are feasting on venison, they are, in our area anyway, going to get to be the size of Dire Wolves: Berkshires are overrun with deer - and they are only going to fet more numerous.

wow the web really transcends geography. I still use econ161.berkeley.edu to get here so I can't forget that Brad lives in Berkeley. On dog-coyote hybrids dying because they are born in the wrong season, I wonder IS there a wrong season in California ? Maybe German Sheperd coyote hybrids survive out there.

Re:

>>I still use econ161.berkeley.edu to get here so I can't forget that Brad lives in Berkeley.

Except that right now I'm in Barcelona, visiting Pompeu Fabra for a week...

Brad DeLong

i hate to tell all you guys but you don't have coyotes you are dealing with what is known as an eastern brush wolf this is a large hybrid of the grey wolf which came from western canada and the united states,oh and it is not an evolution that would require a mutation in the canis growth gene.
Sgt.M.Hills
R.C.A.