
The eastern coyote, a wild N. American canine with coyote-wolf and dog parentage - curtis
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastern_coyote
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itp
There's a Nature documentary about the Eastern Coyote/Coywolf called,
appropriately enough, "Meet the Coywolf," available on pbs.org[1]. It was
surprisingly non-fluffy for a Nature documentary and if you're interested in
learning more, it's a good place to start.

You can also probably find it elsewhere if you're not a supporter of your
local PBS station, but I'll leave that search up to everyone and their
conscience.

[1] [https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/coywolf-meet-the-
coywolf/](https://www.pbs.org/wnet/nature/coywolf-meet-the-coywolf/)

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ben11kehoe
Also featured recently on the New Hampshire Public Radio podcast Ouside/In
[http://outsideinradio.org/shows/coydogs](http://outsideinradio.org/shows/coydogs)

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dalbasal
Besides the very interesting insight into how evolution, speciation & fauna
dynamics in general work, it is always interesting seeing people's reactions
to the classification problems these grey areas pose.

Species, taxa, subspecies, hybrids, populations, chronospecies, trunk species,
type species.... All words describing a fundamentally non discreet thing. Yet,
knowing that, we (anywhere from casual readers to biology taxonomists) get
stressed and obsessed when our leaky categorisations leak.

It's a good reminder that we're natural categorizors. Our minds are all about
instances and abstract truths. Lassie the dog, coyote the canid, Socrates the
philosopher.

~~~
posterboy
The name of a species is fixed to a specific "holotype". Oetzi is the only
neanderthal; archeopterix had different names for each of the first specimen
found; Carl von Linee is the holotype for Homo Sapiens Sapiens, according to
some taxonomists, at least (himself, I guess) ... Exactly because this is a
known problem. A single individual is as discrete as it gets.

In linguistics this problem is called the single other hypothesis and rater
popular. In programming and math it's the diamond square problem, e.g. for
java's inheritance mechanism, which is countered with generics, traits,
typeclasses and so on. Abstract Algebra and Category theory have to deal with
this and the corollary from my POV is, that it's just really complicated.

Before genetics, phenotype was based on appearance. Genetic genealogy is a
rather young field, so it might take a while for deeper insights to trickle
down. Also, it's not completely wrong to base a classification on environment,
because a protein to synthesis X from Y is useless, if the environment doesn't
provide Y.

~~~
tropo
A single individual you say? I present to you the clonal colony and the
synctium.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonal_colony](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clonal_colony)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncytium](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syncytium)

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JoshMnem
I spent a lot of time tracking them through the forest when I was younger. If
you live in the northeast, get a copy of this book[1]. The difference between
a coyote's tracks and a domestic dog's tracks teaches something interesting
about the difference between a non-domesticated human and a domesticated
human.

[1] [https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062735249/tracking-and-
the...](https://www.harpercollins.com/9780062735249/tracking-and-the-art-of-
seeing-2nd-edition)

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zumzumzum
Check out Coyote America by Dan Flores. It's an amazing account of the
coyote's spread across the continent in the face of extreme pressure to
extirpate it in the west.

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pvaldes
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Mitchell](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taylor_Mitchell)

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martind81
Eastern Coyote is a variety of Coywolf but it's not the only one:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coywolf)

