Angiostrongylus vasorum, commonly known as French heartworm, is a metastrongyloid nematode widely distributed in Europe, South America and Africa. This helminth uses gastropods as intermediate hosts, and has as deinitive hosts various species of canids including foxes, coyotes and domestic dogs. Clinical signs of A vasorum include respiratory distress and bleeding disorders. Infection may take months to detect and present no clinical signs, but can also lead to death. As part of a larger study on coyotes, helminths were extracted from tracheae, hearts and lungs using a lushing technique. Four out of 284 coyotes were infected with A vasorum, conirmed by sequencing the cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 gene (cox1) on the mitochondrial genome. To our knowledge, this is only the second report of coyotes infected with A vasorum in North America, and the irst for mainland North America. Veterinarians now need to watch for clinical signs of this parasite in domestic dogs. Coyotes (Canis latrans) evolved in savannah, prairie and woodland habitats, 1 but now are commonly found in urban areas. 2-4 As contact becomes more frequent between coyotes and humans, coyotes have begun ingesting higher proportions of anthropogenic food. 4-7 This change in diet brings coyotes into close contact with domestic dogs (C familiaris), leading to increased risk of both species exchanging parasites and permitting prolonged duration of parasitic outbreaks. 8 Helminths shared between domestic dogs that commonly infect

Echinococcus spp. tapeworms can cause serious diseases in mammals, including humans. Within the E. granulosus species complex, metacestodes produce unilocular cysts that are responsible for cystic echinococcosis in animal intermediate hosts. Canids are definitive hosts, harbouring adult cestodes in their intestines. Adult E. canadensis were recovered from the small intestine of 1 of 262 coyotes ( Canis latrans ) from Nova Scotia, Canada. Subsequently, we found unilocular cysts in lungs and livers of 4 of 8 sympatric moose ( Alces alces ) from Cape Breton Island. DNA was extracted from three cysts using the Qiagen DNeasy Blood and Tissue kit and assayed by polymerase chain reaction (PCR) with primers (cest4 and cest5) for a 117-bp region of the small subunit of ribosomal RNA of E. granulosus sensu lato , and further validated as E. canadensis G8 using primers targeting nicotinamide adenosine dinucleotide dehydrogenase subunit 1 (ND1) and cytochrome c oxidase subunit 1 (CO1) mitochondrial genes. These are the first records of E. canadensis in any of the three Maritime provinces, which include Nova Scotia, New Brunswick, and Prince Edward Island. The parasite was thought to be absent in this region due to extirpation of wolves ( Canis spp.) in the 1800s. These findings suggest that further wildlife surveillance and risk assessment is warranted.

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Collection methods can be biased, leading to misperceptions of population composition. We tested if collection method (footholds, snares, and shooting) gave different perceptions of demography or morphology of 3,539 eastern coyotes (Canis latrans Say, 1823). We found no differences in sex ratios of animals among methods, but did find some evidence that younger, lighter, and smaller animals were more likely to be collected by footholds than with snares. Female reproductive histories (placental scars) did not differ among methods. In a sub-sample of 232 animals, we found no evidence of differences in helminth parasitism relative to collection method. Overall, our large sample for the non-parasite analyses facilitated finding statistical significance; the biological implications hinge on the precision required in estimating population composition, and focal characteristics being compared. For example, mass was 5.3% lower for coyotes caught with footholds versus snares and 10.4% lower for coyotes caught with footholds versus being shot, whereas linear trait measurements of coyotes caught with footholds were generally smaller by at most 4.5% compared to other methods (broadly consistent with linear versus volumetric measurements). Our study provides important baseline information for making inferences about coyote (and other species’) populations sampled using only a single collection method.