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Comment by nazca | Hacker News Reader

The only issue with his metaphor is that coyotes have been doing very well at the meta game. At the time of European contact there were no coyotes anywhere near Connecticut. Lewis and Clark didn't encounter them until they hit the great plains. Actually only a few decades ago there were no coyotes near the eastern US.

But coyotes are clever and they've learned to adapt and live in close proximity to humans. And as we've changed the landscape and removed & added various animals and plants to the landscape they've found niches that work for them and have expanded their range greatly.

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Slightly OT but the evidence we have strongly suggests that exterminating the wolf is the primary reason for the expansion of the range of the coyote to most of the continental USA.

http://www.bbc.com/earth/story/20170516-when-wolves-return-t...

Here in Ontario (and likely elsewhere), the majority of coyotes are actually coywolves (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf). We have them on the property regularly and they are no problem at all, but they are larger and more adaptable than the coyote of old.

Undoubtedly true when looking at the continent overall, but the salient point is that coyotes are thriving today in suburban and in some cases even urban environments. These are not areas that were ever owned by wolves, and to the point of the blog post, areas that require coyotes to "play the game" well with humans.

But the biggest winner in the meta-game is the coyote’s domesticated cousin: the dog. They are the darlings of the human world. If earth was imploding and we had to leave for another inhabitable planet, I bet there would be a few dogs and cats aboard those spaceships. Not so sure there would be room for coyotes. Caring for dogs is now a many billion dollars industry and growing. Dogs might be dumber than coyotes but they’ve totally won the meta-game by being thoroughly domesticated (though one can argue at a cost to their dignity and independence). There is an obvious analogy here.

This makes me question what is should mean to "win" in a genetic sense. The dog may be high in number, but its genetic selection has been artificial, controlled by humans selecting for favourable traits. Similarly, could we consider the cow to be successful, having been bred to produce enough milk that it can't stand, yet with a population much higher than before humans?

I'm not sure about whether dogs or cows are successful, but their genes surely are.

Something similar is happening in Europe. The golden jackal [1], a close relative to the coyote, is expanding its range northward and westward from the Eastern Mediterranean [2]. They are breeding now in Austria [3] and recently an animal was spotted by a camera trap in the Netherlands [4].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golden_jackal

[2] https://phys.org/news/2015-07-expansion-golden-jackal-europe...

[3] https://www.zobodat.at/pdf/ANNA_109B_0073-0076.pdf

[4] https://www.wur.nl/en/newsarticle/First-golden-jackal-spotte...

For those interested on the more-fascinating-than-you-might-assume history of coyotes I suggest you read Coyote America by Dan Flores. There is also a fantastic podcast episode that hits the high points of the book: http://www.themeateater.com/podcasts/episode-033/

I think that coyotes are doing well as species, not necessarily as individuals. I suspect this is the framework of the post as well, but it should have been more explicit.

Non-domesticated technology/industry/world changing innovators ("coyotes") will exist in any modern society and will still change the world. But an average young coyote cub could still be very miserable.

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