Coming to our woods: super coyotes

Link
http://thetandd.com/coming-to-our-woods-super-coyotes/article_4fcd4080-75cc-11e3-92d3-0019bb2963f4.html
This article was written by Dr. John Rheney and published on January 5, 2014.

Summary
South Carolinians are aware of a steady migration of coyotes and their impact on game. Lately, coyotes have been stalking humans on hiking and bike trails, and reports of attacks have been growing- many of them in urban areas where they target children, pedestrians with their dogs. They prey on pets to survive the winter and early spring. Using genetic research, researchers think most attacks are actually coming from the Eastern coyote, or the "coywolf"- the cross between a coyote and a wolf. Sizing between a coyote and a wolf, coywolves eat a wide variety of foods and live in packs like wolves and bearing the same jaws, skulls, and teeth. Some have also been breeding with wolves. These canines have been moving from the Midwest into the Northeast, but some stray as far south as South Carolina. Another cross is between the coyote and the domesticated dog. For some coon dog owners, their coon dogs mated with the coyotes, producing hybrids known as "coydogs". Coydogs are larger than dogs and lack the coyotes' shy nature to humans. In fact, they can grow aggressive in urban areas where people don't drive them away. They breed year round but after about three generations of inbreeding, they get genetic diseases. At some point, coydogs coming from the west may meet the coywolves in South Carolina. The writer questions what the coydog/coywolf hybrid will look like and whether they will be as aggressive as some coyotes.

Relevance
This article relates to our current unit on evolution because we studied a little on subspecies, which are two groups that have some sort of a barrier so they can't interbreed to produce fertile offspring. Due to the migration of the coyotes into the areas where humans and wolves live, it harbingered crosses between the coyote and the dog, and the coyote and the wolf, which produced fertile offspring, demonstrating that the coyote and the dog are subspecies. (Whether the coyote and the wolf are subspecies is currently debatable.) From what we learned in the heredity unit, hybrid offspring may display traits from its parents. This explains why the jaws, skull, and teeth of a coywolf resemble a wolf's. Size may a polygenic trait, which might explain why the size of the coywolf is between the coyote and the wolf.