Coyotes out-adapt wolves into cities and Panama
Canis latrans, the coyote or prairie wolf, stays smaller than the gray wolf yet colonizes human landscapes so well that IUCN rates it Least Concern. Sightings reach eastern Panama, and urban coyotes are now ordinary in many North American cities.
The coyote is native to North America and fills a niche much like the golden jackal’s in Eurasia. It is smaller than the gray wolf, with longer ears, a relatively bigger braincase, and a slimmer muzzle, and it runs with its tail held low. Males usually weigh 8 to 20 kg and females 7 to 18 kg; northern coyotes average 18 kg against 11.5 kg in Mexico. The largest on record, killed near Afton, Wyoming, in 1937, weighed 34 kg. Highland animals are darker than desert ones, and albinos are almost unknown: two among 750,000 killed by government hunters between 1938 and 1945.
Its diet is broad, from deer, rabbits, and rodents to fish, insects, and occasionally fruit, and it lives either in family groups or loose packs of unrelated animals. Its howl shifts quickly in pitch, and the name Canis latrans means barking dog.
When Europeans arrived, coyotes kept mostly to open plains and dry country in the west; Meriwether Lewis described the prairie wolf in Montana in May 1805, and Thomas Say gave it its scientific description in 1819. The word comes from the Nahuatl coyotl and first appeared in print in 1780. Since then it has spread with settlement and turned up in eastern Panama for the first time in 2013.
Coyotes cross with eastern and red wolves, producing coywolves, and most North American wolves carry some coyote DNA. In Aridoamerican folklore Coyote is a shape-shifting trickster, and Mesoamerica honoured the animal as a symbol of military power, but Anglo-American attitudes toward it remained largely negative as of 2012.
Source: Coyote
