Hunt more coyote, get more coyote

Humans often assume killing will solve the problem. Here's yet another example of why we are wrong.

First, what is it about big features coming out at the end of the year? This piece was months in the making, and I’m so honored to share it. It’s about a laboratory at Rockefeller University, where young patients with a rare cancer work in the lab, side by side with scientists. The research has turned a former black box of a disease into one where treatments are in development. I’m so honored that the parents and scientists shared their stories with me. CW for child death, cancer, and everything that goes with it.

Onward.

To coyotes.

Photo by Caleb Woods on Unsplash

We humans love to kill our way out of our animal problems. Wolves eating livestock? Kill ‘em. Coyote attacks a child? Kill it. Too many deer? Cull ‘em.

This raises a lot of questions. Moral ones, yes. Is it our place to kill an animal that troubles us, especially when it’s trouble is because we put that opportunity right under its nose (fed the coyote, for example, or left cattle undefended, or planted a huge pile of hostas). But it also raises ecological questions. Questions like: Does this actually work?

We tend to assume that it does. After all, if you kill a thing, see its body on the ground in front of you, you know that it is gone. It stands to reason that it cannot trouble you anymore.

This reasoning betrays our ignorance. Cut down a tree, yes, you will have fewer trees, for a few years, until wind and time can do their work.

But kill a coyote, and wildlife managers began to realize that you merely get more coyote in their stead. Often they would kill or poison coyotes, and the next year? Coyotes were back, sometimes more than before! Had they missed some? Was it fluke? Maybe not.

Roland Kays, a scientist at North Carolina State University (and the NC Museum of Natural Sciences, where he has a lab fishbowl), is a specialist in collaring and camera trapping (he’s also a source I turn to frequently for all things coyote and mid-size mammal on the East Coast). In this latest study, he and his colleagues took three years of camera trap data from more than 4,500 camera trap sites across the US, and applied abundance models to it. This allowed them to look at how different factors on the landscape correlated with the number of coyotes living there. Some areas are rural, some urban, some have forests, some don’t, some have cougars or wolves, some do not.

And some allow hunting of coyotes and others don’t.

The paper showed a bunch of associations. For example, agricultural areas, forests with lots of food, shrubby habitat, all were associated with more coyotes because those are places with many coyote resources. Some areas had lower abundance because coyotes had only recently colonized those areas (see: the northeastern US), so probably haven’t gotten to their maximum yet (keep in mind that maximum here doesn’t mean like, packed into studio apartments. It means meeting the carrying capacity of the area, which is how many coyotes the habitat can support. So some areas with lots of food will support more, and some with little food will support less).

There were more coyotes on large scales of human development. Not in the most urban environments but in places where there’s lots of urban-nature edges. Think suburbs. Parks. Cemeteries.

And where there was more hunting of coyotes, there weren’t fewer coyotes. Instead, there were often MORE. This seems odd. Shouldn’t more hunting reduce coyotes? Shouldn’t coyote abundance go down as the animal seek safer havens?

The scientists don’t speculate why this is, but I can see a few potential reasons.

1. Taking away the coyote does not take away the nice things that made the area coyote friendly. It doesn’t take away the food or the shelter. Those things are still there, and now no one is using them! Areas with hunting are making themselves below carrying capacity, meaning there’s opportunity.

2. Coyotes are highly mobile, dispersing species (esp young males), and it’s not like they can read bag limits. With nice habitat, why not move in?

3. “New” coyotes are not going to know how to get about in this new territory. Coyotes that have lived in an area for a while may well know where people with guns are likely to be. They probably know what areas have good food, they know how to behave around the local humans and dogs. New arrivals will not, and may make more of a “nuisance” of themselves.

I think the first reason is probably the most likely. Just because an area has hunting doesn’t mean it will be an area hostile to coyotes (the humans will be hostile, but the habitat won’t). Coyotes, as I note in my book, are like a gas. They will expand to fill their container.

And this means that all this hunting, all this killing (thousands of coyotes are killed per year across the US) is not just arbitrary and cruel. It’s inefficient. If you hunt more coyote, and get more coyote…maybe we need to find better options. Say, investing more in livestock defense (livestock guardian dogs, electric fencing, even flags, canids really don’t like flags). Educating people to not feed coyotes* and to work to keep them leery of humans.

Because as we learn, more and more, we cannot hunt our way out of our problems.

References:

Moll, R.J., Green, A.M., Allen, M.L. and Kays, R. (2024), People or predators? Comparing habitat-dependent effects of hunting and large carnivores on the abundance of North America's top mesocarnivore. Ecography e07390. https://doi.org/10.1111/ecog.07390

Where have you been?

• Is it watching a video of a vampire bat running on a treadmill? Is it finding out that in fact vampire bats frequently scuttle along on the ground to find their prey? Doesn’t this make your day better?

• Maybe it’s reading about how sick plants make noises…that moths can hear! Moths then lay their eggs elsewhere (on healthy plants, thanks). It’s wild to realize there’s a whole range of signals being sent all around us, and we have no idea.

• Did you know that that Andean black bears get it on in trees. The video is….let’s just say there’s some suggestive jostling.

• Perhaps you’ve heard about how mealworms can eat plastic. But it turns out, it takes about 100 worms 4.5 months to eat one face mask. So…we’re gonna need a LOT of worms.

• Bird flu has been…unexpectedly mild. That doesn’t mean it’s like a cold, rather it means it doesn’t have a 50% death rate (as expected). Why? Scientists aren’t sure!

• I was unaware that there are people in this world who put caviar on Doritos. As I cannot unlearn this I give this knowledge to you, in the form of a beautiful, and sad, story of caviar and sturgeons.

• Women often feel pushed out of academia, and sometimes? It’s because men can’t bear to see their success.

• Don’t drink raw milk. Get vaccinated. I can’t believe I have to say this. But there’s a reason all those children in Victorian novels died.

• Parents really want to believe that social media is evil for their kids. I get it. We want to think there’s one thing we can control that will fix the problem! But even though it sells books, the science is just not there.

• Some hermit crabs wear anemones as pants. I myself would love anemone pants.

• Finally, this profile of Martha Wells is delightful.

Where have I been?

I really enjoyed working on a truly mind-bending piece for Templeton. For a long time, scientists thought that no matter what the DNA of the body went through, the DNA in germline cells—eggs and sperm—was protected. Now? Now we are not so sure, and this could be a hack to some fast evolution.

As I mentioned at top, it was a real honor to share the stories of these cancer patients, who chose to spend what in some cases were their final months or years in a lab, working on their own cancer.

*For the love of god please stop feeding the wildlife. Please. Stop. They don’t need you. They don’t want this. You are feeding the wildlife to satisfy your own Disney princess self. Please face that and get a pet instead.