Dan Flores

Los Angeles has never been without coyotes since its founding.

So as coyotes spread across America in the 20th century, they eyed rats, mice, geese, and fruit trees, in short, all the opportunities where people weren't trapping or poisoning them or calling wildlife service hunters on them and moved in with us.

Coyotes in Denver, Chicago, and everywhere else, including my parents' little town of 600 people in Louisiana, have been the result.

Yet again, we have to learn to coexist because resistance is futile.

How have coyotes managed to survive what wolves and scores of other species could not?

Tito had been an allegorical answer.

Another came from folk tradition in the Southwest.

The only thing smarter than a coyote is God.

But a pair of biologists, Guy Connolly and Fred Knowlton, finally came up with the answer.

As a result of co-evolution alongside larger wolves, which had long harassed them, coyotes had evolved a remarkable set of survival traits.

Under assault, they have larger litters.

If coyote numbers go down, more food sources mean they get more pups to adulthood.

If the breeding alpha female of a pack dies, beta females breed and have more pups.

Most remarkably, coyotes had evolved a rare ability we humans share called fission fusion.

Like us, they are normally a social or fusion species.

But also like us, when conditions warrant, they can split into floaters and pairs, fission, and scatter and colonize.

Conley and Knowlton showed that you could kill 70% of a coyote population year after year without ultimately reducing its numbers.

But you very likely did spread them.

Let me share a personal story.

In the 21st century West, something resembling this is so common the experience might not even be mine, although I'm pretty sure this particular one is.