I'm very surprised by this, poor girl.
I'd love to read the studies into the coyote's development, it makes sense that it is plugging the gap left by the wolf.
Another good reason for not hunting one species too far.
Hammock Monkey,
Here are some links that talk about the red wolf decline and the coyote taking its place -- the most recent news article on a study (the main one I was referring to in my post) I can't find at the moment.
Anyhow, here is some additional info on the red wolves:
http://www.redwolves.com/about_wolves/topten.html
http://www.enature.com/fieldguides/detail.asp?recNum=MA0461
http://www.wolfsource.org/?page_id=114
http://www.nhptv.org/NatureWorks/redwolf.htm
A couple of notes on the content above -- the idea that red wolves evolved from Gray Wolves and Coyotes interbreeding a few hundred thousand years ago is *hotly* debated. Mta DNA studies suggest it is true, the fossil record suggests that the red wolf was in North America several hundred thousand years *before* the arrival of the gray wolf. So the jury is out on this.
The stuff about the interbreeding with coyotes is for real, but it's a tricky issue when talking about the changes in the northeastern Coyotes (they've shot coyotes in Maine that weight 68 pounds in the last few months, *enormous* for a coyote -- that's adolescent wolf size.)
The red wolf has been extinct in the wild since the mid-1970s and only exists now in protected breeding colonies. It was documented that the Red Wolf would on occasion interbreed with coyotes 35 years ago when overhunting reduced Red Wolf populations so low that males couldn't find suitable wolf mates and thus mated with the incoming coyote populations.
However, those few hybrid pups were absorbed into the coyote populations, not the Red Wolf populations. And even then, the number of hybrids was very low -- maybe a hundred vs. the 100s of thousands of coyotes on the east coast.
No meaningful levels of interbreeding are known to have happened since then -- attempts to reintroduce Red Wolves in the wild haven't been successful to date.
Some believe that the initial interbreeding a couple of decades ago was the trigger for the change in the eastern coyotes.
However, three decade old hybrids don't account for the recent changes in coyote morphology in the northeast. The haven't been growing gradually over the decades, they've been shooting up in size in the last 10 years.
Some speculate that the coyotes are now mating with gray wolves, which is known to happen on occasion. However other biologists don't buy this argument because Gray Wolves keep coyotes out of their territory.
So no one agrees on exactly what is happening with these coyotes, but they do agree they are changing..... Nature abhors a vacuum and by killing off the Red Wolves we've created a vacuum.
