Black Coyotes

I suspect that the further east you go, the more likely to find them.
I am real curious what the DNA would tell about if the black comes from gray wolf, or dog in their distant gene pool.

Admixture in North American canids

We analyzed 63 ancestry-informative autosomal SNPs in 437 northeastern canids and found that admixture is pervasive across the region. The ancestry of all coyotes we sampled showed a clear signal of hybridization with various Canis groups: western wolves, eastern wolves, and domestic dogs. Recent evidence from mitochondrial and Y-chromosome DNA support our finding of extensive hybridization among western gray wolves, eastern wolves, coyotes, and dogs in eastern North America (Wilson et al. 2012; Wheeldon et al. 2013). This coyote-wolf-dog hybrid swarm extends into the Midwestern United States. Contrary to our expectations from an earlier finding of no wolf mtDNA in Ohio coyotes (Kays et al. 2010a), these same individuals were, on average, 66% coyote and 24% wolf in their nuclear genome (Table 2). The extension of wolf introgression into Ohio was unexpected because vonHoldt et al. (2011) found that midwestern/southern coyotes were genetically distinct from hybrid northeastern coyotes, and that admixture in midwestern/southern coyotes was primarily with dogs. In their analyses, midwestern/southern coyotes had, on average, 7.5% dog ancestry and 2.4% wolf ancestry. However, their inference came from a limited sample of 13 northeastern and 19 midwestern/southern coyotes, only three of which were from Ohio. Those three Ohio coyote samples are on the periphery of the statistical distribution of other Ohio coyotes genotyped in this study (Figure 2). This is not surprising since those three coyotes were selected for genotyping with the SNP microarray because they were morphologically peculiar, having unusual pelage and craniodental phenotypes.

How did wolf-derived DNA arrive in Ohio? We propose three hypotheses that require further investigation: (1) coyote-wolf hybrids, descendants of the northern expansion front, circled around the Great Lakes and back westward into Ohio; (2) coyote-wolf hybridization occurred in Minnesota or western Ontario (Kays et al. 2010b) and the initial colonizers of Ohio were admixed; (3) coyote-wolf hybrids from southern Ontario moved into the southern peninsula of Michigan and then south into Ohio. These three and any other hypotheses must be able to account for the disparate patterns in mitochondrial and nuclear DNA.

In theory, it is possible that northeastern coyotes evolved to be more wolf-like genetically due to natural selection, genetic drift, or both, thus appearing admixed in the absence of actual hybridization. We reject this hypothesis on several grounds. First, early studies were highly suggestive of a hybrid origin for northeastern coyotes, long before the availability of any molecular data needed to confirm this (Monzón 2012). The hybridization hypothesis was proposed by various authors entirely on the basis of morphology (Lawrence & Bossert 1969) and captive rearing experiments (Silver & Silver 1969; Kolenosky 1971; Mengel 1971). Second, molecular evidence has unequivocally confirmed coyote-wolf admixture in the Great Lakes region and further east since the early 1990s (Lehman et al. 1991; Wayne & Lehman 1992), including recent evidence of wolf mitochondrial DNA introgressing northeastern coyotes (Koblmüller et al. 2009; Kays et al. 2010a). Third, genetic drift alone would make some rare wolf alleles become more frequent at a few loci but become extinct at most other loci, and selection alone would make rare wolf alleles more frequent at a few loci but remain constant at most other loci. However, our results show the rare wolf alleles universally became more frequent in eastern coyotes than in western coyotes, even if they were absent in the western coyote parental population (Figure 3), demonstrating the rapid influx of wolf DNA from introgressive hybridization.

During the design phase of our study there was little evidence that hybridization with domestic dogs is prevalent in the Northeast. Way et al. (2010) found no dog mtDNA in 67 coyotes from eastern Massachusetts, and Kays et al. (2010a) found only one dog mtDNA haplotype in a region-wide sample of 715 eastern coyotes. Consequently, we did not select any SNPs to be diagnostic of dog ancestry when designing our study, but were able to consider this using a post hoc analysis. Our findings are consistent with those of vonHoldt et al. (2011), who found that northeastern coyotes have on average 9.1% dog ancestry; we found that region-wide (including Ohio) coyotes have on average 10.7% (± 3.3% SD) dog ancestry. Using twelve autosomal microsatellites, Wheeldon et al. (2013) recently found that coyotes in southeastern Ontario have on average 2.3% dog ancestry. Together, these results suggest a limited, but appreciable, amount of coyote-dog hybridization in the recent past (11 to 24 generations, estimated by vonHoldt et al. 2011). Since then, the dog components of the genome have been diluted and integrated into the wild gene pool through generations of backcrossing with eastern coyotes. We found no evidence for ongoing coyote-dog hybridization; the homogeneity and low proportion of the dog component in our large sample of wild eastern coyotes suggest that coyote-dog hybridization is infrequent, although the wild population is so abundant that coyote-dog F1 hybrids may appear at a frequency below the detection power of our sample. On the other hand, the dosage of coyote vs. wolf alleles and the fraction of heterozygous loci (Figure S2) suggest that at least some individuals are first- or second-generation coyote-wolf hybrids backcrossed to coyote (vonHoldt et al. 2013).

Our data reveal a complex pattern of admixture among coyotes, dogs, and two distinct wolf populations. We do not believe the common name “Coywolf,” proposed for northeastern coyotes by Way et al. (2010), captures this complexity. Similar patterns of three- and four-way hybridization have been observed in North American Canis. Hailer and Leonard (2008) found some degree of hybridization among sympatric coyotes, Mexican wolves, and red wolves in Texas; Bohling and Waits (2011) detected frequent admixture among coyotes, gray wolves, red wolves, and domestic dogs in North Carolina; and Rutledge et al. (2010) showed that eastern wolves in Ontario act as a conduit of gene flow between coyotes and western wolves by hybridizing with both. Hybridization in Canis extends outside North America: domestic dog genes have introgressed into the wild Australian dingo, European gray wolf, and Ethiopian wolf (Canis simensis) populations (Gottelli et al. 1994; Elledge et al. 2008; Godinho et al. 2011).

Hey John, you been saving old catch photos and claiming them as your own? I caught this one at my farm in 2016, must have sent you a picture. You can take the credit though, I still got the $250 from the taxi market, so I'm happy.

Here's another view, it's the prettiest black one I've caught over the years.

Hahaha! Son of a gun! Is that your coyote! I just went through my pictures and send some black ones. I didn’t know I had someone else’s in there, Wil! That’s funny.


I was just thinking about you yesterday. I went to buy some more plywood for beavers and thought about the boards I gave you. Those suckers experienced inflation! Lol.

Good to hear. Good chatting on text with you today, buddy. Keep tearing them up!

One I caught yesterday

Just caught one here in southern MT, nobodys seen one around here!!!