Biased Coyote Harvest Estimates: A Paradox

Krause, G. F.; Sampson, Frank W.; Orr, John M.

doi:10.2307/3799855

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

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“…We additionally analyze antlered deer harvest data not corrected for license sales (Table S3) and harvests of deer, coyotes, and foxes all scaled by hunting license sales (Table S4) to ensure that our results are statistically robust to changes in hunter participation. We use deer (big game) license sales throughout because small-game hunters focus on a variety of species, and individuals may only report that they are coyote or fox hunters if they opportunistically kill one of these species incidental to other activities (46). The strength of each candidate model was evaluated using corrected Akaike Information Criterion (33,47).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deer, predators, and the emergence of Lyme disease

Levi¹,

Kilpatrick²,

Mangel

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

274

189

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Lyme disease is the most prevalent vector-borne disease in North America, and both the annual incidence and geographic range are increasing. The emergence of Lyme disease has been attributed to a century-long recovery of deer, an important reproductive host for adult ticks. However, a growing body of evidence suggests that Lyme disease risk may now be more dynamically linked to fluctuations in the abundance of small-mammal hosts that are thought to infect the majority of ticks. The continuing and rapid increase in Lyme disease over the past two decades, long after the recolonization of deer, suggests that other factors, including changes in the ecology of small-mammal hosts may be responsible for the continuing emergence of Lyme disease. We present a theoretical model that illustrates how reductions in small-mammal predators can sharply increase Lyme disease risk. We then show that increases in Lyme disease in the northeastern and midwestern United States over the past three decades are frequently uncorrelated with deer abundance and instead coincide with a range-wide decline of a key small-mammal predator, the red fox, likely due to expansion of coyote populations. Further, across four states we find poor spatial correlation between deer abundance and Lyme disease incidence, but coyote abundance and fox rarity effectively predict the spatial distribution of Lyme disease in New York. These results suggest that changes in predator communities may have cascading impacts that facilitate the emergence of zoonotic diseases, the vast majority of which rely on hosts that occupy low trophic levels.

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Deer, predators, and the emergence of Lyme disease

Levi¹,

Kilpatrick²,

Mangel

et al. 2012

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

274

189

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Coyote harvest may be biased by the type of hunting or reporting (Krause et al, 1969;Sacks et al, 1999), but neither of those factors was present in our study. Young and Jackson (1951) also reported varying sex ratios for harvested coyotes in different years.…”

Section: Hypothesis Tests For Population Characteristicsmentioning

confidence: 59%

Population Characteristics, Morphometry, and Growth of Harvested Gray Wolves and Coyotes in Alaska

Mitchell¹,

Chaney²,

Aho³

et al. 2022

ARCTIC

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Few concurrent studies exist of sympatric gray wolf (Canis lupus) and coyote (C. latrans) harvest at far northern latitudes. Moreover, no studies explicitly examine effects of concurrent harvest on phenotypes of wolves and coyotes. We documented changes in sex and age characteristics and morphology of gray wolves and coyotes harvested by hunters near Ptarmigan Lake, east-central Alaska, USA, between 1998 and 2001. We hypothesized that the harvest would result in larger, heavier canids, reduce densities, and increase young to adult ratios in both wolves and coyotes. We generated von Bertalanffy growth curves indicating that wolves and coyotes of both sexes increased in length or weight until 2 or 3 years old. No significant changes in either mean length or weight or length to weight ratios occurred during the 3-year study, except that coyote mean length was longer over the last winter of study. Catch-per-unit effort (CPUE) for wolves ranged from 0.061 to 0.112 killed/day and for coyotes from 0.552 to 0.11 killed/day over the study. CPUE indicated that coyotes but not wolves declined in abundance. Changes in male to female and young to adult ratios did not differ significantly for either canid. We posit that coyote populations were disproportionately affected by the conflation of the severe Arctic environment and sustained harvest. Our findings will be beneficial for managing sympatric canid populations and for understanding demographic responses to density-dependent processes in wolves and coyotes, especially at far northern latitudes.

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Biased Coyote Harvest Estimates: A Paradox

Cited by 2 publications

References 0 publications

Deer, predators, and the emergence of Lyme disease

Deer, predators, and the emergence of Lyme disease

Population Characteristics, Morphometry, and Growth of Harvested Gray Wolves and Coyotes in Alaska

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