Coyotes have been known to live a maximum of ten years in the wild and 18 years in captivity.
Range lifespan
Status: wild: 10 (high) years.
Range lifespan
Status: captivity: 18 (high) years.
Average lifespan
Status: captivity: 15.0 years.
Average lifespan
Status: wild: 14.5 years.
Average lifespan
Status: captivity: 21.8 years.
Average lifespan
Status: wild: 21.0 years.
Average lifespan
Status: wild: 14.5 years.
Average lifespan
Status: captivity: 18.0 years.
Coyotes are extremely adaptable and use a wide range of habitats including forests, grasslands, deserts, and swamps. They are typically excluded from areas with wolves. Coyotes, because of their tolerance for human activities, also occur in suburban, agricultural, and urban settings.
Habitat Regions: temperate ; terrestrial
Terrestrial Biomes: taiga ; desert or dune ; savanna or grassland ; chaparral ; forest ; scrub forest ; mountains
Wetlands: swamp
Other Habitat Features: urban ; suburban ; agricultural ; riparian
Coyotes are native to the Nearctic region. They are found throughout North and Central America. They range from Panama in the south, north through Mexico, the United States, and Canada. They occur as far north as Alaska and all but the northernmost portions of Canada.
Biogeographic Regions: nearctic (Native )
Coyotes are versatile in their eating habits. They are carnivorous; 90% of their diet is mammalian. They eat primarily small mammals, such as eastern cottontail rabbits, thirteen-lined ground squirrels, and white-footed mice. They occasionally eat birds, snakes, large insects and other large invertebrates. They prefer fresh meat, but they consume large amounts of carrion. Part of what makes coyotes so successful at living in so many different places is the fact that they will eat almost anything, including human trash and household pets in suburban areas. Plants eaten include leaves of balsam fir and white cedar, sasparilla, strawberry, and apple. Fruits and vegetables are a significant part of the diet of coyotes in the fall and winter months. Coyotes hunt animals in interesting ways. When on a "mousing" expedition, they slowly stalk through the grass and sniff out the mouse. Suddenly, with all four legs held stiffly together, the coyotes stiffen and pounce on the prey. Hunting deer, on the other hand, calls for teamwork. Coyotes may take turns pursuing the deer until it tires, or they may drive it towards a hidden member of the pack. Coyotes sometimes form "hunting partnerships" with badgers. Because coyotes aren't very effective at digging rodents out of their burrows, they chase the animals while they're above ground. Badgers do not run quickly, but are well-adapted to digging rodents out of burrows. When both hunt together they effectively leave no escape for prey in the area. The average distance covered in a night's hunting is 4 km.
Animal Foods: birds; mammals; reptiles; carrion ; insects; terrestrial non-insect arthropods; terrestrial worms
Plant Foods: leaves; fruit
Primary Diet: omnivore
Coyotes help in keeping many small mammal populations in check, such as mice and rabbits. If populations of these small mammals were allowed to become too large it would result in habitat degradation
Mutualist Species:
Coyotes help to control some agricultural pests, such as rodents. Coyote pelts are also still collected and sold in some areas.
Positive Impacts: body parts are source of valuable material; controls pest population
Coyotes serves as hosts for a number of diseases, including rabies. They are considered a threat to poultry, livestock, and crops. Coyotes may also compete with hunters for deer, rabbits, and other game species.
Negative Impacts: injures humans (carries human disease); causes or carries domestic animal disease
Coyotes are common and widespread because of their extraordinary adaptability.
US Federal List: no special status
CITES: no special status
State of Michigan List: no special status
IUCN Red List of Threatened Species: least concern
Coyotes use auditory, visual, olfactory and tactile signals to communicate. They are the most vocal of all North American wild mammals, using 3 distinct calls (squeak, distress call and howl call) which consist of a quick series of yelps, followed by a falsetto howl. Howling may act to announce where territories are to other packs. Coyotes also howl when two or more members of a pack re-unite and to announce to each other their location. Their sight is less developed and is used primarily to note movement. They have acute hearing and sense of smell. They use stumps, posts, bushes or rocks as "scent posts" on which they urinate and defecate, possibly to mark territory. Coyotes are very good swimmers but poor climbers.
Communication Channels: visual ; tactile ; acoustic ; chemical
Other Communication Modes: choruses ; scent marks
Perception Channels: visual ; tactile ; acoustic ; chemical
Coyotes are one of the dominant terrestrial carnivores in North America, with humans and wolves being their greatest enemies.
Coloration of coyotes varies from grayish brown to a yellowish gray on the upper parts. The throat and belly are whitish. The forelegs, sides of head, muzzle and feet are reddish brown. The back has fulvous colored underfur and long, black-tipped guard hairs that produce a black dorsal stripe and a dark cross on the shoulder area. The tail, which is half the body length, is bottle shaped with a black tip. There is also a scent gland located on the dorsal base of the tail. There is one moult per year, which starts in May with light loss of hair and ends in July after profuse shedding. Coyotes are significantly smaller than gray wolves and much larger than foxes. Coyotes are distinguished from domesticated dogs by their pointed, erect ears and drooping tail, which they hold below their back when running. The eyes have a yellow iris and round pupil. The nose is black and usually less than one inch in diameter. The ears are large in relation to the head and the muzzle is long and slender. The feet are relatively small for the size of the body. The pes has four digits and the manus has five with a small first digit. Coyotes run on their toes (digitigrade). The dental formula is 3/3 1/1 4/4 2/3. The molars are structured for crushing and the canines are rather long and slender.
Range mass: 7 to 21 kg.
Range length: 75 to 100 cm.
Other Physical Features: endothermic ; homoiothermic; bilateral symmetry
Sexual Dimorphism: male larger
Average basal metabolic rate: 19.423 W.
Coyotes are very secretive. Especially near human habitations they are active mostly early in the morning and late in the evening. Coyotes keep their young in or near the den while they are young so that the pups aren't killed by predators and competitors such as wolves and mountain lions.
Known Predators:
Courtship lasts for approximately 2 to 3 months. Female coyotes are monoestrous and are in heat for 2 to 5 days between late January and late March. Mating occurs within these 3 months. Once the female chooses a partner, the mates may remain paired for a number of years, but not necessarily for life.
Mating System: monogamous
Spermatogenesis in males takes around 54 days and occurs between January and February depending on geographic location. Gestation lasts from 60 to 63 days. Litter size ranges from 1 to 19 pups; the average is 6. The pups weigh approximately 250 grams. The young are born blind, limp-eared and pug-nosed. After 10 days the eyes open, the pups weigh 600 grams and their ears begin to erect in true coyote fashion. Twenty-one to 28 days after birth, the young begin to emerge from the den and by 35 days they are fully weaned. They are fed regurgitated food by both parents. Male pups disperse from the dens between months 6 and 9, while females usually stay with the parents and form the basis of the pack. Adult size is reached between 9 and 12 months. Sexual maturity is reached by 12 months. Coyotes hybridize with domestic dogs and occasionally with gray wolves.
Breeding interval: Coyotes usually breed once each year.
Breeding season: Breeding occurs from January to March.
Range number of offspring: 1 to 19.
Average number of offspring: 5.7.
Range gestation period: 50 to 65 days.
Range weaning age: 35 to 49 days.
Range age at sexual or reproductive maturity (female): 9 to 10 months.
Range age at sexual or reproductive maturity (male): 9 to 10 months.
Key Reproductive Features: iteroparous ; seasonal breeding ; gonochoric/gonochoristic/dioecious (sexes separate); sexual ; fertilization ; viviparous
Average birth mass: 250 g.
Average number of offspring: 6.
Female coyotes gestate and nurse their young. Both male and female coyotes bring food to their young after they are weaned and protect their offspring. The young sometimes stay with the pack into adulthood and learn how to hunt during a learning period.
Parental Investment: altricial ; pre-fertilization (Provisioning, Protecting: Female); pre-hatching/birth (Provisioning: Female, Protecting: Female); pre-weaning/fledging (Provisioning: Female, Protecting: Male, Female); pre-independence (Provisioning: Male, Female, Protecting: Male, Female); post-independence association with parents; extended period of juvenile learning
Coywolf is an informal term for a canid hybrid descended from coyotes, eastern wolves, gray wolves, and dogs. All members of the genus Canis are closely genetically related with 78 chromosomes and therefore can interbreed.[1] One genetic study indicates that these two species genetically diverged relatively recently (around 55,000–117,000 years ago). Genomic studies indicate that nearly all North American gray wolf populations possess some degree of admixture with coyotes following a geographic cline, with the lowest levels occurring in Alaska, and the highest in Ontario and Quebec, as well as Atlantic Canada.[2] Another term for these hybrids is sometimes wolfote.
Hybrids of any combination tend to be larger than coyotes but smaller than wolves; they show behaviors intermediate between coyotes and the other parent's species.[3][4] In one captive hybrid experiment, six F1 hybrid pups from a male northwestern gray wolf and a female coyote were measured shortly after birth with an average on their weights, total lengths, head lengths, body lengths, hind foot lengths, shoulder circumferences, and head circumferences compared with those on pure coyote pups at birth. Despite being delivered by a female coyote, the hybrid pups at birth were much larger and heavier than regular coyote pups born and measured around the same time.[3] At six months of age, these hybrids were closely monitored at the Wildlife Science Center. Executive Director Peggy Callahan at the facility states that the howls of these hybrids are said to start off much like regular gray wolves with a deep strong vocalization, but changes partway into a coyote-like high pitched yipping.[5]
Compared with pure coyotes, eastern wolf × coyote hybrids form more cooperative social groups and are generally less aggressive with each other while playing.[6] Hybrids also reach sexual maturity when they are two years old, which is much later than occurs in pure coyotes.[7]
Eastern coyotes range from New England, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania,[8] Ohio,[9] West Virginia,[10] Maryland,[11] Delaware, and Virginia.[12] Their range also occurs in the Canadian provinces of Ontario, Quebec, New Brunswick,[13] Nova Scotia,[14] Prince Edward Island and Newfoundland and Labrador.[15] Coyotes and wolves hybridized in the Great Lakes region, followed by an eastern coyote expansion, creating the largest mammalian hybrid zone known.[16] Extensive hunting of gray wolves over a period of 400 years caused a population decline that reduced the number of suitable mates, thus facilitating coyote genes swamping into the eastern wolf population. This has caused concern over the purity of remaining wolves in the area, and the resulting eastern coyotes are too small to substitute for pure wolves as apex predators of moose and deer.[17]
The main nucleus of pure eastern wolves is currently concentrated within Algonquin Provincial Park. This susceptibility to hybridization led to the eastern wolf being listed as Special Concern under the Canadian Committee on the Status of Endangered Wildlife and with the Committee on the Status of Species at Risk in Ontario. By 2001, protection was extended to eastern wolves occurring on the outskirts of the park, thus no longer depriving Park eastern wolves of future pure-blooded mates. By 2012, the genetic composition of the park's eastern wolves was roughly restored to what it was in the mid-1960s, rather than in the 1980s–1990s, when the majority of wolves had large amounts of coyote DNA.[17]
Aside from the combinations of coyotes and eastern wolves making up most of the modern day eastern coyote's gene pools, some of the coyotes in the northeastern United States have mild domestic dog (C. lupus familiaris) and western Great Plains gray wolf (C. l. nubilus) influences in their gene pool, suggesting that the eastern coyote is actually a four-in-one hybrid of coyotes, eastern wolves, western gray wolves, and dogs. The hybrids living in areas with higher white-tailed deer density often have higher degrees of wolf genes than those living in urban environments. The addition of domestic dog genes may have played a minor role in facilitating the eastern hybrids' adaptability to survive in human-developed areas.[18]
The four-in-one hybrid theory was further explored in 2014, when Monzón and his team reanalyzed the tissue and SNP samples taken from 425 eastern coyotes to determine the degree of wolf and dog introgressions involved in each geographic range.[19] The domestic dog allele averages 10% of the eastern coyote's genepool, while 26% is contributed by a cluster of both eastern wolves and western gray wolves. The remaining 64% matched mostly with coyotes. This analysis suggested that prior to the uniformity of its modern-day genetic makeup, multiple swarms of genetic exchanges between the coyotes, feral dogs, and the two distinct wolf populations present in the Great Lakes region may have occurred. Urban environments often favor coyote genes, while the ones in the rural and deep forest areas maintain higher levels of wolf content. A 2016 meta-analysis of 25 genetics studies from 1995 to 2013 found that the northeastern coywolf is 60% western coyote, 30% eastern wolf, and 10% domestic dog. However, this hybrid canid is only now coming into contact with the southern wave of coyote migration into the southern United States.[20]
The taxonomy of the red and eastern wolf of the Southeastern United States and the Great Lakes regions, respectively, has been long debated, with various schools of thought advocating that they represent either unique species or results of varying degrees of gray wolf × coyote admixture.
In May 2011, an examination of 48,000 single nucleotide polymorphisms in red wolves, eastern wolves, gray wolves, and dogs indicated that the red and eastern wolves were hybrid species, with the red wolf being 76% coyote and 20% gray wolf, and the eastern wolf being 58% gray wolf and 42% coyote, finding no evidence of being distinct species in either.[21] The study was criticized for having used red wolves with recent coyote ancestry,[22] and a reanalysis in 2012 indicated that it suffered from insufficient sampling.[23]
A comprehensive review in 2012 further argued that the study's dog samples were unrepresentative of the species' global diversity, having been limited to boxers and poodles, and that the red wolf samples came from modern rather than historical specimens.[24] The review was itself criticized by a panel of scientists selected for an independent peer review of its findings by the USFWS, which noted that the study's conclusion that the eastern wolf's two unique nonrecombining markers were insufficient to justify full-species status for the animal.[25]
In 2016, a whole-genome DNA study suggested that all of the North American canids, both wolves and coyotes, diverged from a common ancestor 6,000–117,000 years ago. The whole-genome sequence analysis shows that two endemic species of North American wolf, the red wolf and eastern wolf, are admixtures of the coyote and gray wolf.[26][27]
In a study that analyzed the molecular genetics of coyotes, as well as samples of historical red wolves and Mexican wolves from Texas, a few coyote genetic markers have been found in the historical samples of some isolated Mexican wolf individuals. Likewise, gray wolf Y chromosomes have also been found in a few individual male Texan coyotes.[28] This study suggested that although the Mexican wolf is generally less prone to hybridizations with coyotes, exceptional genetic exchanges with the Texan coyotes may have occurred among individual gray wolves from historical remnants before the population was completely extirpated in Texas. The resulting hybrids would later on melt back into the coyote populations as the wolves disappeared.
The same study discussed an alternative possibility that the red wolves, which also once overlapped with both species in central Texas, were involved in circuiting the gene flows between the coyotes and gray wolves, much like how the eastern wolf is suspected to have bridged gene flows between gray wolves and coyotes in the Great Lakes region, since direct hybridizations between coyotes and gray wolves is considered rare.
In tests performed on a stuffed carcass of what was initially labelled a chupacabra, mitochondrial DNA analysis conducted by Texas State University showed that it was a coyote, though subsequent tests revealed that it was a coyote × gray wolf hybrid sired by a male Mexican wolf.[29]
In 2013, the U.S. Department of Agriculture Wildlife Services conducted a captive-breeding experiment at their National Wildlife Research Center Predator Research Facility in Logan, Utah. Using gray wolves from British Columbia and western coyotes, they produced six hybrids, making this the first hybridization case between pure coyotes and northwestern wolves. The experiment, which used artificial insemination, was intended to determine whether or not the sperm of the larger gray wolves in the west was capable of fertilizing the egg cells of western coyotes. Aside from the historical hybridizations between coyotes and the smaller Mexican wolves in the south, as well as with eastern wolves and red wolves, gray wolves from the northwestern US and western provinces of Canada were not known to interbreed with coyotes in the wild, thus prompting the experiment.
The six resulting hybrids included four males and two females. At six months of age, the hybrids were closely monitored and were shown to display both physical and behavioral characteristics from both species, as well as some physical similarities to the eastern wolves, whose status as a distinct wolf species or as a genetically distinct subspecies of the gray wolf is controversial. Regardless, the result of this experiment concluded that northwestern wolves, much like the eastern wolves, red wolves, Mexican wolves, and domestic dogs, are capable of hybridizing with coyotes.[3]
In 2015, a research team from the cell and microbiology department of Anoka-Ramsey Community College revealed that an F2 litter of two pups had been produced from two of the original hybrids. At the same time, despite the six F1's successful delivery from the same coyote, they were not all full siblings because multiple sperm from eight different northwestern wolves were used in their production. The successful production of the F2 litter, nonetheless, confirmed that hybrids of coyotes and northwestern wolves are just as fertile as hybrids of coyotes to eastern and red wolves. Both the F1 and F2 hybrids were found to be phenotypically intermediate between the western gray wolves and coyotes. Unlike the F1 hybrids, which were produced via artificial insemination, the F2 litter was produced from a natural breeding.[30]
The study also discovered through sequencing 16S ribosomal RNA encoding genes that the F1 hybrids all have an intestinal microbiome distinct from both parent species, but which was once reported to be present in some gray wolves. Moreover, analysis of their complementary DNA and ribosomal RNA revealed that the hybrids have very differential gene expressions compared to those in gray wolf controls.
Hybrids between coyotes and domestic dogs have been bred in captivity, dating to pre-Columbian Mexico.[31] Other specimens were later produced by mammal biologists mostly for research purposes. Domestic dogs are included in the gray wolf species.[32] Hence, coydogs are another biological sub-variation of hybrids between coyotes and gray wolves - the dog being considered a domesticated subspecies of Canis lupus.[33]
Coywolf is an informal term for a canid hybrid descended from coyotes, eastern wolves, gray wolves, and dogs. All members of the genus Canis are closely genetically related with 78 chromosomes and therefore can interbreed. One genetic study indicates that these two species genetically diverged relatively recently (around 55,000–117,000 years ago). Genomic studies indicate that nearly all North American gray wolf populations possess some degree of admixture with coyotes following a geographic cline, with the lowest levels occurring in Alaska, and the highest in Ontario and Quebec, as well as Atlantic Canada. Another term for these hybrids is sometimes wolfote.