Cameras Catch Coyotes as They Take Manhattan [Slide Show]

The Gotham Coyote Project is using cameras, citizen scientists and environmental DNA to study coyotes as they move into New York City, and eventually, Long Island

SILHOUETTE A coyote stops in front of a Gotham Coyote Project camera in the South Bronx the night of July 8, 2015. Coyotes are mostly nocturnal animals, so a lot of the photos from the project’s camera traps are taken at night... Credit: Courtesy of Gotham Coyote Project
ON ALERT The coyote checks its surroundings. Eastern coyotes typically attain an adult weight of 20 kilograms and resemble German shepherds. Credit: Courtesy of Gotham Coyote Project
PUP OUT TO PLAY A coyote pup, born this past spring, sniffs around a camera site in the South Bronx on June 20, 2015. Coyote litters usually have four to six pups. They typically mature by nine months and then leave their parents to find territories of their own... Credit: Courtesy of Gotham Coyote Project
EXPLORING The inquisitive pup surveys its surroundings. Although it is tough to tell in the dark, coyote fur ranges in color from blonde to tannish black. Most of the animals have reddish legs and ears with a white chin... Credit: Courtesy of Gotham Coyote Project
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MARKING ITS TERRITORY The pup marks its territory by urinating in the minutes after activating the camera trap. A study in Animal Behaviour found that alpha coyotes (typically members of a pack’s breeding pair) scent-marked more than other pack members and did so more during breeding season, whereas pups scent-mark throughout the year... Credit: Courtesy of Gotham Coyote Project
FIELD WORK Wildlife biologists Anthony Caragiulo (left), Mark Weckel (center) and Chris Nagy (right) conduct fieldwork in the South Bronx on August 4, 2015. Caragiulo cleared the site for his environmental DNA (eDNA) collection, while Weckel and Nagy prepared to remove the camera trap from the tree in the background... Credit: Rebecca Harrington
CAREFUL COLLECTION Wildlife biologists Nagy (left) and Weckel use gloves to avoid cross-contaminating the eDNA samples. Using DNA-sequencing technologies, their colleague Anthony Caragiulo plans to see how many animals he can detect from the DNA they left behind on the soil... Credit: Rebecca Harrington
A GROUP EFFORT Weckel (right) hands a soil collection tube to his colleague Nagy. The Gotham Coyote Project partners with several New York City schools to accomplish their many coyote-surveying activities, which include scat collection, camera studies, sighting reports and now eDNA collection... Credit: Rebecca Harrington
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