Karels noted that rural and suburban coyote tended to be picky, only eating a few different species. Rabbits, gophers and squirrels were important in the rural coyote diet, although the researchers do not have seasonal information from that area.
Suburban coyotes had a seasonably variable diet, switching between eating their natural prey in the cooler, wetter winter, and eating ornamental fruits when they ripen in the summer. Los Angeles’ urban coyotes still eat rabbits and rodents, but Larson, Karels and their fellow researchers found that they also ate lots of garbage, ornamental fruits like figs and palm tree seeds, and domestic cats. Using both techniques together allowed the research team to more accurately identify human food that would have otherwise gone unidentified. Human trash was not commonly found in scats – 22 percent of urban scat and 6 percent of suburban scat – but coyote whiskers (that is, the isotopes in the whisker tissues) from both areas showed that up to 38 percent of their diet could be human food leftovers. Karels and Larson suspect most of the cats were feral, but not all. In particular, ornamental fruits - 26 percent of the urban scat and 24 percent of the suburban scat - and cats - 20 percent of the urban scat and 4 percent of the suburban scat - were also important sources of food for the coyote. Sixty-five percent of urban coyote scat and 37 percent of the suburban coyote scat had human-related items. “We were just surprised to discover how much,” she said. Larson said the researchers expected to find that urban and suburban coyote would eat human-related food. “Needless to say, for those coyotes living in urban Los Angeles, we found they were eating a lot of human food, mostly found in the trash we humans leave behind.” “If the coyote whiskers had high levels of carbon-13, which signifies the presence of corn, then it could only have come from coyotes eating lots of human food,” Larson said. Corn is fed to livestock and poultry, which humans, in turn, eat. Corn syrup is used in many processed foods, including bread. “What we were looking for was corn, which is very distinctive from plants naturally found in Southern California,” said Larson, who graduated from CSUN in May 2019 with a master’s in biology and is currently working on her Ph.D. Larson explained that different plants have distinct carbon isotope signatures. They analyzed the whiskers for their stable isotope ratios - the ratio of variants of chemical elements that are heavier because they contain more neutrons in their nucleus. They also collected whiskers from coyotes captured by the National Park Service for other research projects and discovered as roadkill. Larson, lead on the project, identifying hair from prey consumed by a coyote. To find out what exactly L.A.’s coyotes are eating, Larson, Karels and their collaborators, including a team of 150 citizen science volunteers, dissected the scat (the technical term for poop) found at sites across Los Angeles, Westlake Village and Thousand Oaks, They were looking for fur, feathers, bones, seeds, insect parts and anything else that could help identify what the coyotes were eating.įormer biology graduate student Rachel N. The National Park Service has been studying urban coyotes since 2015. Riley of Santa Monica Mountains National Recreation Area, which is a unit of the National Park Service. The study’s other authors include Justin L. The study, “ Effects of urbanization on resource use and individual specialization in coyotes ( Canis latrans) in southern California,” was published last month in Public Library of Science (PLoS) One, the international, open-access, online scientific journal. While they eat a lot of garbage, they also eat a lot of the fruit found on the ground and, yes, domestic cats.” to the urban neighborhoods around CSUN, to the mountains that surround the region and everywhere in between. “Because they will eat anything, coyotes can live practically anywhere - from downtown L.A. “They are omnivores, which means they will eat practically anything that fits in their mouths,” Karels said. A coyote walking through a Los Angeles neighborhood.
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