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Comment by kjkjadksj | Hacker News Reader

I wouldn’t be surprised if the ecological niche once occupied by the wolf has already been taken over by coyotes perhaps. The context of the environment and food resources available in modern colorado are certainly much different than in the time the wolf roamed, probably furthering favoring the efficiency of coyotes.

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Many years ago, in college I took an elective ecosystems course from a wildlife biologist whose family raised sheep in Montana after the wolf reintroduction there. He was a big fan of the wolves, on the basis that while they did take a few sheep every year, they also virtually wiped out the local coyote population, who took a lot more sheep than the wolves did.

It hasn't. The prey populations in that part of the state are out of control and causing issues, which is one of the reasons these predators are being re-introduced.

Part of the reason prey populations are out of control is the abundance of food available to them. You’d probably be able to support more wolves than historically there ever were with such populations. Hard to say if this will lead to a significant dent or not all that being said, reintroductions don’t always play out as expected. Every time you go up a “level” of the food web e.g. from plant to plant eater to predator, in the best cases the absolute numbers are 1/10; eg 100 plants can support 10 rabbits and 1 predator. If there are now 100 rabbits theres probably 10x as much food as before. Having that many rabbits means whatever is around that eats them e.g. coyotes or bobcats population as also went up 10x in that time. Therefore even if the wolf entirely displaced all bobcats or pumas or coyotes or whoever, the amount of prey being eaten might not change really. Who eats them might change, but maybe not their absolute numbers.

I would imagine that Coyotes are a bit more opportunistic and rely more on scavenging and hunting smaller pray they can tackle on a solo hunt such as rodents and rabbits, but occasionally doing the big game pack hunt. For Wolves I would thing the pattern is opposite.

So while their ecological niche somewhat overlaps, it does so in a complimentary way, that is—and this is me being an armchair ecologist—the presence of Coyotes may only encourage the Wolves even more to go after the large gracing pray in packs as the competition is too tough for scavenging and the easier solo hunting of small pray.

Honestly, I'd be very surprised if coyotes filled the niche formerly occupied by wolves. Coyotes rarely exceed 40-50lbs and they primarily eat small prey like rabbits and squirrels with the occasional fawn. Wolves are 2x-3x as large -- they do hunt some of the small game but they'll also take deer, elk, and small bison.

I was just thinking about how well a wolf would do against a bison. Maybe these ranchers should consider making the switch from cattle to bison. Harder to wrangle, sure, but much more evenly matched against natural predators I imagine.

Eastern coyotes are often over 50 lbs and will sometimes take small deer. Or cats and small dogs in an urban environment...

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