An Invasive Species: Where Coyotes Came From

The standard test for a native species has two parts: it evolved in the region, or it arrived and established itself without human assistance. The eastern coyote fails both.

Coyotes did not evolve here. Museum and archaeological records place their historical range in the arid west and the plains, tracking non-forest habitat, unchanged for thousands of years up to the late 1800s. They reached southwestern Ontario in 1919.

Coyotes did not arrive on their own. The expansion that began around 1900 was enabled by forest fragmentation, agricultural clearing and the extirpation of the larger predators that had excluded them — all of it human work. Remove those three things and coyotes are still on the prairies. Their arrival here is a downstream effect of European land use, no less human-caused than a ballast-water introduction; it was just slower and nobody signed for it.

The animal that got here isn't the one that left, either. Eastward expansion ran through hybridization with eastern wolves and domestic dogs, producing a larger canid, and genomic work on the expansion fronts finds selection on genes tied to dispersal and habituation to novel environments. The eastern coyote is roughly a century old as a form.

Defenders will say the coyote is native to North America and therefore native here. That's a continental argument doing municipal work. Ontario doesn't manage wildlife at continental scale, and "native to the landmass" would make a great deal of what we spend money excluding perfectly native too.

Why this matters for policy: Toronto's strategy treats coyotes as a settled component of a stable local ecosystem, with coexistence as the given and intervention as the exception requiring justification. That framing assumes a baseline that doesn't exist. A century-old, human-enabled, still-evolving colonist is a management question, not a heritage one.

Sources:

Hody & Kays 2018, mapping coyote expansion — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5974007/ Genomic diversity and selection on eastern expansion fronts — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6309008/ Southwestern Ontario 1919 record, via canid hybridization review — https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3488665/