Coyote Habitat Use in a Tropical Deciduous Forest of Western Mexico

Abstract

Coyotes are one of the most intensively studied carnivores of the world. However, most information on coyote ecology has been obtained from individuals living within the northern portion of their distribution. In their southern range (Mexico and Central America), home ranges (e.g., Hernandez et al. 1993, Servin and Huxley 1995) and food habits (e.g., Hernandez et al. 1994, Sanabria et al. 1996) have been studied in temperate areas or in subtropical deserts and scrublands. In tropical areas, information about coyotes is limited to diet analyses (Vaughan and Rodriguez 1986, HidalgoMihart et al. 2001), and, recently, home-range estimations (Hidalgo-Mihart et al. 2004). However, coyotes are widely distributed in these regions, and they have been recorded in areas where they were absent 25 years ago, such as the northern part of Panama (Mendez et al. 1981, Vaughan 1983), the northern Yucatan peninsula (Sosa-Escalante et al. 1997), and Belize (Platt et al. 1998). The factors that have contributed to the establishment of new coyote populations in tropical areas of Mexico and Central America are unclear, but it has been hypothesized that deforestation of tropical forests by human activities is the most important factor (Vaughan 1983, Sosa-Escalante et al. 1997), probably because these cleared areas are similar to the open and semi-open habitats where coyotes evolved and for which the species is well adapted (Young and Jackson 1951, Bekoff 1977). In addition, although coyotes can live in forested regions, forests can be marginal habitats for them because of the coyote’s poor abilities to hunt in dense forest vegetation, probably reflected in malnutrition, low fecundity, and low population densities (see Richer et al. 2002 for a review). In Mexico, tropical forests have been intensively deforested in the last 30 years (see Challenger 1998 for a review). Therefore, in these areas it is necessary to have information about habitat selection by coyotes to assess the effect of human-opened areas on this species and to test whether coyotes are attracted to these environments. Habitat selection by animals is considered an optimization process that involves factors such as food supplies, density of conspecifics, body size, competitors, predators, and landforms (Morrison et al. 1998). Consequently, research on coyote habitat selection in tropical areas is a fundamental tool to estimate the future population trends of this predator, especially because current land transformation may lead to an increase in coyote–human conflicts (Cuaron 2000), such as damage to agricultural products and poultry and livestock predation (Hidalgo-Mihart et al. 2001). It has been found that habitat selection is deeply influenced by scale, therefore, important aspects of habitat selection could be masked by a study confined to only 1 scale (Johnson 1980). Therefore, assuming that animals make decisions about habitat use at hierarchical stages, our objective was to determine habitatselection patterns of coyotes at local and regional scales along the coast of Jalisco, Mexico. This area is covered mainly by tropical deciduous forest (TDF), which originally occupied 14% of the Mexican territory (Rzedowski 1983), but by 2000, only 27% remained intact (Trejo and Dirzo 2000). On the coast of Jalisco, around 25% of the TDF was transformed to croplands and induced grasslands for cattle ranching during the last 25 years (Miranda 2002). Even though coyotes are not new inhabitants of the coast of Jalisco (Merriam 1897), it is probable that the clearing of the TDF in this area has created a suitable environment for the expansion of local coyote populations. This is supported by the observations that coyotes in the region feed mostly on rodents that invade cleared areas and cultivated fruits such as papaya and mango (Hidalgo-Mihart et al. 2001). Also, scent-station surveys have shown that coyotes are more abundant in croplands and induced grasslands than in the interior of forested areas (CantuSalazar et al. 1998). Therefore, we predicted that along the coast of Jalisco, coyotes would select the open environments created by humans for cattle grazing and agriculture and would avoid the tropical forests that remain, when analyzed at 2 different spatial scales. 1 E-mail address: gabriel.hidalgo@dacbiol.ujat.mx