Effect of Compensatory Immigration on the Genetic Structure of Coyotes

Despite efforts to reduce their effects on livestock and native ungulates within the southeastern United States, coyotes (Canis latrans) can recover from control programs. It is unknown how coyotes compensate for high mortality following trapping, so there is great interest to identify methods that can provide insight into coyote response to intensive trapping. To investigate if population genetic tools can decipher how coyotes recover from intensive trapping, we combined an empirical test of how genetic differentiation, diversity, and familial structure changed following trapping on the Savannah River Site (SRS), South Carolina, USA, with spatially explicit genetic simulations. The preand post-trapping periods had similar genetic diversities and were not genetically differentiated as expected by either compensatory reproduction or immigration from a single genetic source. The post-trapping coyote populations exhibited weaker signatures of philopatry with little evidence for increased dispersal distances of young coyotes, which suggests immigration caused a decrease in familial structure. Our simulations indicated that spatial autocorrelation coefficients and observed heterozygosities change as immigration increases, whereas population differentiation, allelic richness, and displacement distances do not. Collectively, our results suggest that coyotes recover from intensive trapping via reproduction and immigration, which likely makes preventing compensation difficult. Monitoring post-trapping populations may offer more insight into maximizing the effectiveness of control efforts, and based on our simulations, population genetics can provide critical information about the amount of compensatory immigration following trapping. 2017 The Wildlife Society.