Friend of mine lives about 10 miles from me on 100 acres in the woods and is off-grid. She reported that she shot a wolf/coyote hybrid. Fish&Game guy shows up, looks it over, and tells her to bury it and shut the heck up about it.
Seems the government doesn't want people to know that the wolves are branching out genetically and creating hybrids that are going to wreck havoc on everything else under them in the food chain. I saw a pic of it and it was around 80 lbs and brownish gray and white. Cool looking animal.
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So a bit of history. The US government along with countless local governments and land owners placed bounties on gray wolves. They were more or less wiped out in the eastern US, which is also true of cougars/lions. Lions used to range across the entire continent.
As a result, large prey species like deer, that thrive in an edge rich environment like humans have created, have exploded in numbers. The timing of this change in predator and prey has left most citizens of the US under the impression that deer and other critters running around everywhere ready for harvest on a Sunday morning hunt is normal. It isn’t in many cases.
When I was in college, the state of WI had over a million head of deer estimated. It was something like 5 times the normal carrying capacity of historic estimates. Cause? Predator elimination. Now wolves have been reintroduced, along with elk that were driven out also. The wolves are doing well because it was a buffet of venison.
So assuming similar things have happened in the eastern US, I actually think this change in coyotes and their increased capacity to take larger game will help stabilize the prey species levels. They are now filling an ecological niche that wolves filled and a vacancy in that niche man created well over 100 years ago. It’s part of the fluctuations that are wildlife population dynamics.
Only time will tell though.
The size increase has been occurring over much of eastern USA. I have seen 40 lb coyotes in FL that is a little bit bigger than the average yote out west. The environment can well support wolf size animals because it did so in the past. The deer herds are also back. On their own coyotes would by mutation and natural selection would get larger with time. Having wolf genes entering is just giving natural selection more ammunition to work faster with.
When one starts getting to 60 plus coyotes, relative to fighting off an attack by a pack, I would not feel confident no matter what handgun I had. I would want to be with someone else that was also armed. For shooting one going after livestock or fruit, the pistol is fine. Coyotes will strip an apple or pear tree.
A historic account of a wolf attack. Could such happenings occur again as coyotes evolve into replacements for the extinct grey wolf. I wonder if that wolf pack had been active in eating interred bodies. Sometimes once predators get a taste for human flesh some think they will begin hunting humans.
Sure, the gap left in the food chain due to wolf extirpation was bound to be filled by something due to prey number increases. Yotes are also great dumpster divers. I agree, hybridization serves to speed that process of alteration of a species all the faster.
I don’t think we’ll see true evolution this quickly though, nor a true speciation. Professionals in the natural resource field (which I’m guessing you are) are apt to try and restore natural processes and populations of historically present species if politics can be addressed with local residents. Also, as populations in states like MN, WI, MI increase they will drive prey pops down and wolves will begin to spread out more in coming decades. I would estimate that wolves will begin rebounding in numbers further east, begin coming back down from Canada, and with assistance from man also. I think it more likely that we will see wolves begin to reclaim that large carnivore niche and competition will likely limit coyote alteration.
Of course, this will take some time to hash out.
And since we are totally off topic, I’ll end my thought with I still think a full size 9mm would be ideal for defense. Misses are likely. I want lots of ammo.
Edit: I’m of the school of thought that when common animals show aggression towards humans, they are likely to do so again. Genes and learned behavior can increase that behavior. So you actually help the species by removing those individuals from the breeding population.