Michigan coyotes: What’s for dinner depends on what the neighbors are having

Michigan coyotes in most of the Lower Peninsula are the “top dogs” in the local food chain and can dine on a wide variety of small animals, but in the Upper Peninsula, coyotes coexist with gray wolves and play a subordinate role in the food web. As a result, the diets of U.P. coyotes contain less meat than Lower Peninsula coyotes. That’s one of the findings of a University of Michigan study of the diets and gut microbiomes of three Michigan coyote populations, published in the Journal of Animal Ecology.

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