Abstract
Coyotes (Canis latrans) are highly adaptable, medium-sized carnivores that now inhabit nearly every large city in the United States and Canada. To help understand how coyotes have adapted to living in urban environments, we compared two ecologically and evolutionarily important behavioral traits (i.e., bold-shy and exploration-avoidance behavior) in two contrasting environments (i.e., rural and urban). Boldness is an individual’s reaction to a risky situation and exploration is an individual’s willingness to explore novel situations. Our results from both tests indicate that urban coyotes are bolder and more exploratory than rural coyotes and that within both populations there are individuals that vary across both spectrums. Bolder behavior in urban coyotes emerged over several decades and we speculate on possible processes (e.g., learning and selection) and site differences that could be playing a role in this behavioral adaptation. We hypothesize that an important factor is how people treat coyotes; in the rural area coyotes were regularly persecuted whereas in the urban area coyotes were rarely persecuted and sometimes positively rewarded to be in close proximity of people. Negative consequences of this behavioral adaptation are coyotes that become bold enough to occasionally prey on pets or attack humans.
Highlights
Humans are altering landscapes throughout the world, and understanding how species adapt to altered environments and what can be done to enhance coexistence are important endeavors to maintain species across these new landscapes
Of particular interest has been how animal behavior differs in contrasting landscapes, with key findings indicating that animals generally become more aggressive, exploratory, and bold in urban environments compared to animals in rural and natural systems[6]
To date most evidence indicates that changes in behavior are a result of individual phenotypic plasticity and the ability to learn behavior that matches the requirement of the urban environment[5,14], but it is possible that all three processes act in concert
Summary
Humans are altering landscapes throughout the world, and understanding how species adapt to altered environments and what can be done to enhance coexistence are important endeavors to maintain species across these new landscapes. By animals to new environments are believed to be a response to an altered landscape where animals are adapting to a variety of new challenges like a modified sensory environment, disruption of physiological processes, changes in habitat characteristics, creation of novel food sources, and alterations in species interactions[5,10] Of these factors, alterations in predation pressure has received the most attention; researchers have demonstrated repeatedly that such alterations can modify aggressive, bold, and exploratory behavior in animals[11,12,13]. To date most evidence indicates that changes in behavior are a result of individual phenotypic plasticity and the ability to learn behavior that matches the requirement of the urban environment[5,14], but it is possible that all three processes act in concert
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