Nothing to see here, move along
When Mother Nature is not trying to screw us
you can bet scientists are.
(From Quartz) - Native wolves had been eradicated and the forests of the eastern United States long cut down when residents of western New York first began to notice the arrival of coyotes in the 1940s.
The coyotes of the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains were lithe and quick, usually weighing less than 30 pounds. The newcomers were different.
“These things were unique,” says Javier Monzón, an evolutionary biologist at Stony Brook University in New York. They were bigger and stockier with larger skulls—all the better to kill white-tailed deer, which were making a comeback as forests began to regrow.
Indeed, scientists have since discovered these super-sized coyotes are only about two-thirds coyote. About 10% of their genes belong to domestic dogs and a quarter comes from wolves, with which they hybridized as they moved east north of the Great Lakes.
“They’re not wolves and they’re not like pure coyotes from the West,” says Monzón, who has studied the animals’ genetics. Depending on their location, people call them brush wolves, coydogs, eastern coyotes or coywolves.
Monzón says hybridization enabled eastern coyotes to adapt quickly to fill the niche left by wolves. In fact, areas with the highest densities of deer had coyotes with the greatest proportion of wolf in their genomes. “There was a very rich resource that was waiting to be exploited,” says Monzón. “They’ve done very well here.”
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| Step #2 I would bet cold hard cash that military funded scientists in one or more countries are currently working on genetically engineering a bend of animals and humans . . . for "peaceful" purposes naturally. |
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