Guest wudewasa Posted April 29, 2012 Posted April 29, 2012 Slick, A gentleman that I work with had a coyote pack sneak up on him when he was calling in turkeys on opening day. Due to his camo and location, the pack did not recognize that he was human, and moved very close. He ended up shooting one to protect himself. There are a number of morphometric techiques used to distinguish dogs from wolves. While dogs and wolves share an enlarged frontal bone, dogs have smaller teeth, their skulls are more flattened, and their snouts are shorter than wild canids.
Doc Holliday Posted April 29, 2012 Posted April 29, 2012 That's a spooky feeling too wud. They slip in quick & quiet. My brother & I were set up on a gobbler one am & had a pair of yotes come slipping in . they caught our scent & ran off before we could get a shot. They're very adaptable & smart. I've seen pics floating around the net of a pack of them pulling down an awesome whitetail buck. If I find them ill post .
Doc Holliday Posted April 30, 2012 Posted April 30, 2012 heres the link to the series of photos of the coyotes killing the buck. what a waste,imo. http://www.deerandde...yotes-kill-buck its a lot of pics, click next below the pic of course to view the series of shots.
Guest Posted April 30, 2012 Posted April 30, 2012 There are a number of morphometric techiques used to distinguish dogs from wolves. If coyotes, dogs, & wolves interbreed {in whatever combinations}, will those "techniques" eventually become obsolete?
Guest wudewasa Posted April 30, 2012 Posted April 30, 2012 (edited) Kite, I'm not sure. The Principle of Independent Assortment in genetics states that genes are inherited randomly. Therefore, there will always be variation in coyote populations. Current coat color in the eastern population shows this to be true. Melanistic, yellow, reddish, gray, brown, buff and a myriad of combinations of colors show up in coyotes. While mtDNA shows interbreeding/hybridization between canids via markers, to my knowledge there have been no nuclear DNA analyses done to examine percentages of species present in individual specimens. I believe that eastern coyotes are a dynamic species, adapting and evolving with access to new territories and the occupation of niches that once belonged to apex predators. This will be an interesting journey to study, indeed! As far as dogs and wolves are concerned, in the early 1990s, mammalogists reclassified dogs and wolves as the same species due to the extremely close match in their mtDNA sequences. The two are now considered subspecies of one another, not unlike the modern human/neanderthal situation. Therefore, the term "wolf hybrid" is obsolete and inacurrate. This might help flesh things out- http://www.floridalupine.org/publications/PDF/Canine_Genetics_Simplified_April_2011.pdf Edited April 30, 2012 by wudewasa
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