Species → Coyote
Coyote
Canis latrans
What if it disappeared?
Impact HighIn the chaparral fragments of Southern California where coyotes have disappeared due to habitat fragmentation, the mesopredators they once kept in check — feral house cats, gray foxes, raccoons, skunks — become up to an order of magnitude more active, and several ground-nesting bird species go locally extinct.
DocumentedDetail
Crooks, K.R. & Soulé, M.E. (1999). Mesopredator release and avifaunal extinctions in a fragmented system. Nature, 400, 563–566.
The study tracked 28 fragments of urban chaparral around San Diego. Fragment size and time since isolation predicted coyote presence; in its absence, mesopredator activity — led by the house cat — rose sharply, and ground-nesting bird species richness fell accordingly, with several local extinctions documented directly.
Since the wolf was extirpated across much of eastern North America, the eastern coyote (a product of hybridization with the wolf) has become the region's main predator of white-tailed deer, particularly fawns — but nothing indicates it replicates the wolf's full ecological role on large adult ungulates such as moose.
ExtrapolatedDetail
Extrapolation à partir de Benson, J.F. et al. (2017). Ungulate predation and ecological roles of wolves and coyotes in eastern North America. Ecological Applications, 27(3), 776–793.
The study directly compares ungulate predation rates between wolf-dominant packs and eastern-coyote-dominant packs: the latter consume markedly less ungulate biomass (and more human-derived food), while remaining effective predators of fawns in spring. The ecological replacement of the wolf by the coyote at the landscape scale — effects on forest browsing, for instance — remains an open question rather than an established result.
What's missing to confirm it: Landscape-scale monitoring of forest regeneration and browsing pressure, comparable to what exists for the gray wolf in Yellowstone, is still lacking for the eastern part of the continent.
Documentation
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Canis latrans — The IUCN Red List of Threatened Species
Accessed August 10, 2026
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Crooks & Soulé (1999) — Mesopredator release and avifaunal extinctions in a fragmented system, Nature 400
Accessed August 7, 2026
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Benson et al. (2017) — Ungulate predation and ecological roles of wolves and coyotes in eastern North America, Ecological Applications
Accessed August 7, 2026
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IUCN Red List — Canis latrans, statut et tendance de population
Accessed August 7, 2026
Last verified: August 14, 2026