Originally Posted by FieldGrade
Originally Posted by mudhen
Lots of research has proven that the more coyotes you kill, the more offspring they make, and they make them a lot faster than you can kill them.


I'm not sure about that. An adult pair breeds once a year, period. And that pair are only capable of rearing/feeding so many pups. Just like any wild animal the size of the litter is controlled by the availability of food.
That they would or could "make more off spring and make em faster" sounds more like an old wives tale than science to me but I'm not a biologist...just a old guy that's been hunting Coyotes for 50+ years so what do I know.
The simple explanation is that the two factors that contribute the most to coyote numbers are female age at first breeding and litter size in females. In stable populations, it is rare to find a female breeding before the age of three, and litter sizes (in utero) average a little more than two per female.

When you start removing animals from the population, the social structure breaks down, and the more animals you remove the more it is disrupted. In heavily harvested populations, virtually all of the one-year-old females will have bred, and the average litter size for all age classes will be somewhere around six. So, you have more than three times as many females breeding (because there are a lot more young females than older ones) and each female is putting more than twice as many pups on the ground. Even with an increase in the mortality rate of sub adult pups, population growth increases dramatically.

No old wives were involved or consulted in any of these research projects. grin


Ben

Some days it takes most of the day for me to do practically nothing...