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There are way too many coyotes in North America, and North Americans are having a really hard time getting rid of them. And it's not for lack of trying - heck, some US states consider coyotes to be such a nuisance that they've actually put bounties on the animals' heads. Now, I'm a wildlife biologist, so I could explain that we shouldn't be trying to exterminate coyotes for all sorts of important ecological reasons, like how they are native to central North America and when they are in normal numbers are a critical component of their ecosystem.
However, I'm going to explain that we shouldn't be trying to exterminate coyotes because doing that actually makes more of them. Hi, I'm Cameron, and this is MinuteEarth. Coyote packs tend to be like small families. And in a typical pack of six or so, only the dominant female tends to produce pups. The rest of the pack are often the equivalent of the alpha's teenage children. They are often mature, but still hang around and hunt with their parents. And in this family pack, the younger females don't have their own pups.
Instead, the subordinate females go through bizarre, "fake pregnancies" every breeding season in which they go through all the stages of pregnancy, but they don't actually produce pups. They don't even need to have mated to do this. And it's odd, but it does serve a purpose - it likely primes them to act maternally toward their new brothers and sisters, which probably increases group cohesion. But when the dominant female dies and the pack scatters, her daughters all go out, find mates, and start getting pregnant, for real this time. And then they become the dominant females of their own, new packs.
And get this: younger females tend to have litters that are double the size of the older alphas. So instead of reducing the number of coyotes, a hunter can actually increase the number of coyotes. Because fighting coyotes is like fighting the mythological hydra - every coyote you kill gets replaced by several more. As a result of this special trait, coyote populations have boomed. And as other major predators have faltered under pressure from humans, coyotes have expanded into their ranges. Once constrained to the middle third of North America, today the wily canines are found throughout the continent - from Alaska all the way down to Panama.
There are likely more than 10 million of them around today. The coyote takeover is the result of this paradox: Thanks to their unique social structure and breeding behavior, the coyote population isn't just immune to the effects of hunting, they're enhanced by it. The more you try to rid the world of coyotes, the more they go everywhere. The same thing used to happen when you tried to rid the internet of your personal information. But that's no longer the case. I know, I know - this is the ad integration part of the video.
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