“We can be using that to play in our favor.” “They’re flexible and really smart,” he said. Hazing techniques can be particularly effective at keeping coyotes from getting too close. Getting the public on board to change people’s behaviors toward coyotes in cities would help with management, Schell said. While short term spikes can help the coyotes escape predators, he said, in the long term, they can suppress the immune system and lead to increased diseases. They found puppies that were bolder during the experiments tended to have higher concentrations of both hormones.īut “high baselines are not necessarily good,” he said. Schell and his colleagues collected the puppies every five weeks, shaved them, and pulverized the shaved hair into a very fine powder in order to quantify hormones sequestered in the hair. The two hormones play a role in fight-or-flight and aggressiveness, or boldness. The team also looked at cortisol and testosterone in the coyotes’ fur. “If these animals are able to learn to become so fearless, they’re keying in on specific human behavior than can be curbed. Schell said this is actually good news for management. Pups were quickly learning from their parents that humans weren’t a threat. Schell said the findings are most remarkable because this happened within just two generations. That narrative dampens over time, then builds again with increased human-coyote interactions.” Wildlife officials and police are called in to remove animals, there’s a huge increase in conversation about bold animals and conflict across the landscape. “Every three to five years, there is a super bold coyote influx. “We see this anecdotally in every city,” he said. Then, when incidents like the Quiznos one happens, management ramps up and coyotes become less bold again. Schell said this behavior likely leads to a cycle in which bold pups grow up to be bold adults, which could lead to exacerbating human-wildlife conflict.
“We put the food down, and they started eating.” “We couldn’t even get out of the pen - the pups were six feet away from us,” Schell said. Parents were bolder and the pups were even more so. Their pups also tended to show variation.īut the second year, with the same parents and a second litter of puppies, their findings were remarkable, Schell said. Some coyotes were bolder, but most of them were fairly wary, he said. When they first conducted the experiment with the parents, they found some variation. “That was a proxy for human disturbance to see if the coyotes freaked out,” lead author Schell said. They concentrated food at the front half of the pen while an observer sat down right in front of the enclosure to watch them. In a study published in Ecology & Evolution, Schell and his colleagues conducted experiments to determine how quickly coyotes and their offspring habituated to humans.Īt the USDA-affiliated National Wildlife Research Center (NWRC) Predator Research Facility in Millville, Utah, the team observed coyote behaviors in large enclosures. This bold behavior got Christopher Schell, assistant professor of urban ecology at the University of Washington, Tacoma, thinking about how coyotes and their pups become so comfortable with humans in cities. In 2007, a male coyote ( Canis latrans) wandered right into the open door of a Quiznos restaurant during lunch time in Chicago. ©Steve Guymon/National Wildlife Research Center
Researchers found coyote pups learn bold behavior from their parents. Seven-week-old coyote pups spend time in a Utah research facility with their mother.
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