Category: English

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Betty Medsger, Professor Emeritus of Journalism, San Francisco State University

Are Americans about to be led again into a war based on misrepresentations and lies? It’s happened before, most recently with the wars in Iraq and Vietnam.

President Donald Trump and his administration have presented the country’s growing military operations against Venezuela as a war against drug trafficking and terrorism. Trump has designated the government of Venezuela President Nicolas Maduro as a foreign terrorist organization, the first country to ever receive that designation.

The U.S. military has killed at least 99 crew members of small boats that Trump claims, without presenting evidence, were carrying illegal drugs destined for the U.S. The New York Times reports, however, that “Venezuela is not a drug producer, and the cocaine that transits through the country and the waters around it is generally bound for Europe.”

Trump’s administration has justified the bombing of these boats by declaring they are manned by combatants. U.S. Sen. Jack Reed, a Democrat from Rhode Island, told the Intercept news outlet that the administration “has offered no credible legal justification, evidence or intelligence for these strikes.”

There is no war. Yet.

On Dec. 12, 2025, Trump said, “It’s going to be starting on land pretty soon” and announced four days later a “total and complete blockade of all sanctioned oil tankers going into, and out of, Venezuela.”

As Trump increasingly sounds like he is preparing to go to war against Venezuela, it might be helpful to examine the run-ups to the wars in Iraq and Vietnam – two wars based on lies that led, together, to the deaths of 62,744 Americans.

As an investigative journalist who has written about the vast, secret operations of the FBI and the man who ran it for decades, I am well aware of the dangerous ability the government has to deceive the public. I also covered the opposition to the Vietnam war and the release of information years later that revealed that lies were at the heart of the start of both the Vietnam and Iraq wars.

Fear used to gin up public support

Consider the run-up to the Iraq War.

Fear was the main tool used to convince the public that it was essential for the U.S. to go to war in Iraq. The manufacturing of fear was evident in a speech by Vice President Dick Cheney in August 2002 to a convention of the Veterans of Foreign Wars.

Cheney said, without evidence, that Iraq’s Saddam Hussein was planning to use weapons of mass destruction against the United States and its allies. If the U.S. did not go to war against Iraq, he said, it might experience another Pearl Harbor.

President George W. Bush chose Secretary of State Colin Powell to make the administration’s most prominent public case for going to war in Iraq in a televised speech at the United Nations. Powell was perhaps the most respected official in the Bush administration.

The White House provided Powell with a draft speech. But Powell pressed the CIA regarding what he thought were unsupported claims in the White House draft. Despite his efforts, his speech on Feb. 5, 2003, contained significant unsupported claims, including that Hussein had authorized his military to use poison gas if the U.S. invaded.

“Leaving Saddam Hussein in possession of weapons of mass destruction for a few more months or years is not an option, not in a post-September 11th world,” Powell solemnly declared that day.

He later expressed regret for making the case for war.

“I’m the one who presented it on behalf of the United States to the world,” Powell later said. By then, he said, the speech was “painful” for him personally and would forever be a “blot” on his reputation.

Intelligence agencies pressed to justify war

No weapons of mass destruction existed in Iraq, nor was Hussein connected with al-Qaida, as the Bush administration had said it was. And Iraq did not release poison gas when the U.S. invaded the country. Early postwar assessments of how the U.S. could have invaded Iraq on the basis of serious false claims suggested it happened because the CIA and other intelligence agencies gave President Bush false or inadequate intelligence.

But as extensive official records of pre-war deliberations became available to journalists and others in response to Freedom of Information Act requests, a different explanation emerged.

John Prados, historian at the National Security Archives, discovered an explanation in hundreds of official records that meticulously document the run-up to the war.

They revealed that U.S. intelligence agencies had let themselves be used, he wrote, as “a tool of a political effort, vitiating the intelligence function … They all yielded intelligence predictions of exactly the kind the Bush administration wanted to hear … The intense focus on achieving the conditions for war instead of solving an international problem led to crucial faults in military planning and diplomatic action.”

The administration did not attempt to engage in diplomacy before deciding to go to war. There never was a serious effort, even within the administration, to consider alternatives to war.

George J. Tenet, director of the CIA at the time, later wrote that “based on conversations with colleagues, in none of the meetings can anyone remember a discussion of the central questions: Was it wise to go to war? Was it the right thing to do?”

Most journalists accepted PR at face value

A dearth of serious reporting contributed to the public being ill-informed.

Dan Kennedy, professor of journalism at Northeastern University, recently wrote that only one news organization, the Washington bureau of Knight Ridder – later known as McClatchy – exposed the Bush-Cheney “administration’s lies and falsehoods during the run-up to the disastrous war in Iraq.”

Other reporters relied on the public relations push for war being made to journalists by high-level political appointees in the military, foreign service and intelligence agencies. But Knight Ridder journalists relied on expert, longtime career officers in those agencies who were “deeply troubled by what they regarded as the administration’s deliberate misrepresentation of intelligence, ranging from overstating the case to outright fabrication.”

Lies to Congress and the public also were at the heart of the run-up to the war in Vietnam.

Of the two attacks on a destroyer that the administration of President Lyndon Johnson said required an immediate vast buildup of troops in August 1964, one was provoked by the United States and the other one never happened.

Few if any questions were asked when the House and Senate voted – with only two no votes – on the request for what would be known as the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution. The resolution was used by Johnson and his successor, President Richard Nixon, to keep expanding the war for nearly a decade. By mid-1969, there were 543,400 American troops in Vietnam.

Truth and transparency are crucial

It may seem obvious that the most important lesson to be learned from those wars is that the president and all who contribute to decisions to go to war should tell the truth. But, as shown by the presidents who led the U.S. into wars in Iraq and Vietnam and from Trump’s daily remarks, truth is a frequent casualty.

That increases the need for Congress, the public and the press to demand to be fully informed about these decisions that will be carried out in their name, with their money and with the blood of their sons and daughters. That’s necessary to prevent a president and Congress from making decisions that lead to consequences like these:

In the Iraq War, 4,492 American military members were killed and approximately 200,000 Iraqi civilians were killed. In the Vietnam War, 58,252 American military members were killed, 1.1 million Vietnamese military members were killed, and a staggering 2 million Vietnamese civilians were killed.

Betty Medsger does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Deception and lies from the White House to justify a war in Venezuela? We’ve seen this movie before in run-ups to wars in Vietnam and Iraq – https://theconversation.com/deception-and-lies-from-the-white-house-to-justify-a-war-in-venezuela-weve-seen-this-movie-before-in-run-ups-to-wars-in-vietnam-and-iraq-272044

Source: The Conversation – USA (3) – By Jake Scott, Clinical Associate Professor of Infectious Diseases, Stanford University

The U.S. childhood immunization schedule, the grid of colored bars pediatricians share with parents, recommends a set of vaccines given from birth through adolescence to prevent a range of serious infections. The basic structure has been in place since 1995, when federal health officials and medical organizations first issued a unified national standard, though new vaccines have been added regularly as science advanced.

Vaccines on the childhood schedule have been tested in controlled trials involving millions of participants, and they are continuously monitored for safety after being rolled out. The schedule represents the accumulated knowledge of decades of research. It has made the diseases it targets so rare that many parents have never seen them.

But the schedule is now under scrutiny.

On Dec. 16, 2025, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention adopted its first major change to the childhood immunization schedule, under Kennedy’s leadership. The agency accepted an advisory committee’s vote to drop a long-held recommendation that all newborns be vaccinated against hepatitis B, despite no new evidence that questions the vaccine’s long-standing safety record.

Health and Human Services Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who has cast doubt on vaccine safety for decades, has said he plans to further scrutinize the vaccines children receive.

I’m an infectious disease physician who treats vaccine-preventable diseases and reviews the clinical trial evidence behind immunization recommendations. The vaccine schedule wasn’t designed in a single stroke. It was built gradually over decades, shaped by disease outbreaks, technological breakthroughs and hard-won lessons about reducing childhood illness and death.

With federal officials now casting doubt on its foundations, it’s helpful to know how it came about.

The early years

For the first half of the 20th century, smallpox vaccination was common, required by most states for school entry. But there was no unified national schedule. The combination vaccine against diphtheria, tetanus and pertussis, known as the DTP vaccine, emerged in 1948, and the Salk polio vaccine arrived in 1955, but recommendations for when and how to give them varied by state, by physician and even by neighborhood.

The federal government stepped in after tragedy struck. In 1955, a manufacturing failure at Cutter Laboratories in Berkeley, California, produced batches of polio vaccine containing live virus, causing paralysis in dozens of children. The incident made clear that vaccination couldn’t remain a patchwork affair. It required federal oversight.

In 1964, the U.S. surgeon general established the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices, or ACIP, to provide expert guidance and recommendations to the CDC on vaccine use. For the first time, a single body would evaluate the evidence and issue national recommendations.

New viral vaccines

Through the 1960s, vaccines against measles (1963), mumps (1967) and rubella (1969) were licensed and eventually combined into what’s known as the MMR shot in 1971. Each addition followed a similar pattern: a disease that killed or disabled thousands of children annually, a vaccine that proved safe and effective in trials, and a recommendation that transformed a seemingly inevitable childhood illness into something preventable.

The rubella vaccine went beyond protecting the children who received it. Rubella, also called German measles, is mild in children but devastating to fetuses, causing deafness, heart defects and intellectual disabilities when pregnant women are infected.

A Rubella epidemic in 1964 and 1965 drove this point home: 12.5 million infections and 20,000 cases of congenital rubella syndrome left thousands of children deaf or blind. Vaccinating children also helped protect pregnant women by curbing the spread of infection. By 2015, rubella had been eliminated from the Americas.

Technology opens new doors

One limitation of some early bacterial vaccines was that they didn’t work well in infants. Young children’s immune systems couldn’t mount a strong response to the sugar coating on certain bacteria. In the 1980s, scientists developed a method called conjugate vaccine technology, in which sugars on bacterial pathogens are linked to proteins that the immune system – even in infants – can more easily respond to.

The first target of this innovation was a bacterium called Haemophilus influenzae Type b, or Hib. Before vaccination, Hib was the leading cause of bacterial meningitis in American children, causing roughly 20,000 cases of the disease annually and killing hundreds.

The Hib conjugate vaccine was licensed for use in infants in 1990, and within five years Hib disease in young children dropped by more than 99%. Most pediatricians practicing today have never seen a case.

Hepatitis B and the safety net

In 1991, the CDC added hepatitis B vaccination at birth to the schedule. Before then, around 18,000 children every year contracted the virus before their 10th birthday.

Many parents wonder why newborns need this vaccine. The answer lies in biology and the limitations of screening.

An adult who contracts hepatitis B has a 95% chance of clearing the virus. An infant infected in the first months of life has a 90% chance of developing chronic infection, and 1 in 4 will eventually die from liver failure or cancer. Infants can acquire the virus from their mothers during birth, from infected household members or through casual contact in child care settings. The virus survives on surfaces for days and is highly contagious.

Early strategies that targeted only high-risk groups failed because screening missed too many infected mothers. Even today, roughly 12% to 18% of pregnant women in the U.S. are never screened for hepatitis B. Until ACIP dropped the recommendation in early December 2025, a first dose of this vaccine at birth served as a safety net, protecting all infants regardless of whether their mothers’ infection status was accurately known.

This safety net worked: Hepatitis B infections in American children fell by 99%.

Access becomes a right

The schedule’s expansion was enabled by a crucial policy change. From 1989 to 1991, a measles outbreak swept through American cities, causing more than 55,000 cases and over 120 deaths. Investigators found that many infected children had seen doctors but never been vaccinated. Their families couldn’t afford the shots, and the system had failed to catch them.

Congress responded by creating the Vaccines for Children program in 1994, which provides free vaccines to children who are uninsured, underinsured or on Medicaid. With cost no longer a barrier, ACIP could recommend vaccines based on science rather than worrying about who could afford them.

A unified standard

For decades, different medical organizations issued their own, sometimes conflicting, recommendations. In 1995, ACIP, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Academy of Family Physicians jointly released the first unified childhood immunization schedule, the ancestor of today’s familiar grid. For the first time, parents and physicians had a single national standard.

The schedule continued to evolve. ACIP recommended vaccinations for chickenpox in 1996; rotavirus in 2006, replacing an earlier version withdrawn after safety monitoring detected a rare side effect; and HPV, also in 2006.

Each addition followed the same rigorous process: evidence review, risk-benefit analysis and a public vote by the advisory committee.

More vaccines, less burden

One fact often surprises parents: Despite the increase in recommended vaccines, the number of immune-stimulating molecules in those vaccines, called antigens, has dropped dramatically since the 1980s, which means they are less demanding on a child’s immune system.

The whole-cell pertussis vaccine used in the 1980s alone contained roughly 3,000 antigens. Today’s entire schedule contains fewer than 160 antigens, thanks to advances in vaccine technology that allow precise targeting of only the components needed for protection.

What lies ahead

For decades, ACIP recommended changes to the childhood schedule only when new evidence or clear shifts in disease risk demanded it. Rolling back a long-standing recommendation with no new safety data represents a significant break from that norm.

In June 2025, Kennedy fired all 17 members of ACIP and replaced them) with his own choices, many of whom had a history of anti-vaccine views.

Given this and other unprecedented changes Kennedy has made to vaccine policy in his first year as health secretary, this is unlikely to be the last such reversal.

Kennedy, his newly appointed ACIP panel and others within HHS have pushed to align the U.S. vaccine schedule with European countries such as Denmark, which recommends fewer vaccines. But every country’s schedule reflects its specific disease burden, health care infrastructure and access to care.

Denmark’s more targeted approach works in a small, wealthy country with universal public health care, equitable access and a national registry that tracks every patient. The U.S. health care system is fragmented: Millions are uninsured, many families move between providers, and screening systems have significant gaps.

Major medical organizations, including the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, have rejected the reversal on hepatitis B’s routine use at birth. More broadly, these organizations and several states, including California, New York and Illinois, have indicated they will continue following established, evidence-based guidelines if federal recommendations diverge on other vaccines in the future.

Jake Scott does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. RFK Jr. wants to scrutinize the vaccine schedule – but its safety record is already decades long – https://theconversation.com/rfk-jr-wants-to-scrutinize-the-vaccine-schedule-but-its-safety-record-is-already-decades-long-271408

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Sean Foreman, Adjunct Professor of Political Science, Barry University

After its first competitive mayoral election in 20 years, the city of Miami has a new mayor: former Miami-Dade County commissioner Eileen Higgins.

During the heated campaign, both national political parties were active in organizing voters and providing resources. Many high-profile politicians weighed in with endorsements and visits. Notably, Republicans President Donald Trump and Gov. Ron DeSantis endorsed Higgins’ opponent, Emilio Gonzalez. Meanwhile, Democrats Ruben Gallego – a senator from Arizona – and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg supported Higgins.

Still, Miami’s mayoralty is officially a nonpartisan position. And as the saying goes, there are no Democratic or Republican potholes; they are all of local concern.

I’m a political scientist with a particular interest in local government, and I’ve lived in the Greater Miami area for 30 years.

So what are the “potholes” confronting Miami’s new mayor?

Civility on the dais

Former Mayor Francis Suarez has a charismatic persona, but was not a forceful presence on the dais. During his tenure, City Commission meetings turned into spectacles, with shouting matches, name-calling,
and allegations of corruption.

Higgins, a bilingual, soft-spoken policy wonk, has promised to set a new tone, leading with civility and compassion. The day after the election, she reiterated that promise: “The era of commissioners yelling at one another and threatening to punch one another is going to stop.”

Affordable housing

Affordability and the cost of living were the major substantive campaign issues, with the cost of housing topping the list.

For the second year in a row, the financial services firm UBS lists Miami as the city at highest risk for a housing bubble. Another study ranked the Miami metro area as the least affordable housing market nationally.

The good news: This rise in price appears to be fueled by a strong employment market. But the shortage of housing priced for middle- and working-class families is unsustainable.

While housing supply and prices are largely determined by market forces, government officials can set conditions to promote targeted investments. Higgins has suggested forming a city-run housing trust fund, similar to Miami-Dade County. She has also proposed dedicating city-owned land to affordable housing projects and reforming the city’s permit process.

Charter reform

Charter reform issues, including moving city elections from odd to even years to align with national elections, are on the agenda. Though a court deemed the City Commission’s attempt to move this year’s election invalid, Higgins said she supports moving the election date, pledging to cut her term short to facilitate. This change would require commissioners to hold a referendum and voters to support it.

There also is a debate about changing the size of the City Commission from five to seven or nine commissioners. Higgins supported this idea, noting that other Florida cities the size of Miami have larger commissions. This charter change would also require voter approval, but needs the commission to act or for citizens to initiate the process. The mayor’s role would be to advocate for the need for greater representation of neighborhoods and government responsiveness.

Immigration enforcement

In a city where nearly 60% of the population is foreign-born, immigration issues loom large.

In June 2025, after a contentious meeting, the commission voted 3-2 to approve a 287(g) agreement with Immigration and Customs Enforcement, or ICE, to aid Trump’s enforcement measures.

While Higgins cannot remove the city from the agreement, she plans to minimize Miami’s involvement with immigration enforcement. “There’s no reason in the city of Miami that our police department should be in the job of federal immigration enforcement,” she told the press.

City finances

Municipal budgets have been squeezed by state policies and state Department of Government Efficiency efforts. Recent federal cuts to social service and transportation grants have exacerbated the problem.

Now, state leaders are proposing to eliminate property taxes in 2026, further straining local coffers. Public spending will need to be reduced, or revenues replaced. The mayor makes budget proposals, but it is commissioners who approve them. Higgins will need to lead through persuasion and clear explanations.

Sean Foreman does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. Miami’s new mayor faces a housing affordability crisis, city charter reform and a shrinking budget – https://theconversation.com/miamis-new-mayor-faces-a-housing-affordability-crisis-city-charter-reform-and-a-shrinking-budget-269480

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Ambuj Tewari, Professor of Statistics, University of Michigan

People and institutions are grappling with the consequences of AI-written text. Teachers want to know whether students’ work reflects their own understanding; consumers want to know whether an advertisement was written by a human or a machine.

Writing rules to govern the use of AI-generated content is relatively easy. Enforcing them depends on something much harder: reliably detecting whether a piece of text was generated by artificial intelligence.

Some studies have investigated whether humans can detect AI-generated text. For example, people who themselves use AI writing tools heavily have been shown to accurately detect AI-written text. A panel of human evaluators can even outperform automated tools in a controlled setting. However, such expertise is not widespread, and individual judgment can be inconsistent. Institutions that need consistency at a large scale therefore turn to automated AI text detectors.

The problem of AI text detection

The basic workflow behind AI text detection is easy to describe. Start with a piece of text whose origin you want to determine. Then apply a detection tool, often an AI system itself, that analyzes the text and produces a score, usually expressed as a probability, indicating how likely the text is to have been AI-generated. Use the score to inform downstream decisions, such as whether to impose a penalty for violating a rule.

This simple description, however, hides a great deal of complexity. It glosses over a number of background assumptions that need to be made explicit. Do you know which AI tools might have plausibly been used to generate the text? What kind of access do you have to these tools? Can you run them yourself, or inspect their inner workings? How much text do you have? Do you have a single text or a collection of writings gathered over time? What AI detection tools can and cannot tell you depends critically on the answers to questions like these.

There is one additional detail that is especially important: Did the AI system that generated the text deliberately embed markers to make later detection easier?

These indicators are known as watermarks. Watermarked text looks like ordinary text, but the markers are embedded in subtle ways that do not reveal themselves to casual inspection. Someone with the right key can later check for the presence of these markers and verify that the text came from a watermarked AI-generated source. This approach, however, relies on cooperation from AI vendors and is not always available.

How AI text detection tools work

One obvious approach is to use AI itself to detect AI-written text. The idea is straightforward. Start by collecting a large corpus, meaning collection of writing, of examples labeled as human-written or AI-generated, then train a model to distinguish between the two. In effect, AI text detection is treated as a standard classification problem, similar in spirit to spam filtering. Once trained, the detector examines new text and predicts whether it more closely resembles the AI-generated examples or the human-written ones it has seen before.

The learned-detector approach can work even if you know little about which AI tools might have generated the text. The main requirement is that the training corpus be diverse enough to include outputs from a wide range of AI systems.

But if you do have access to the AI tools you are concerned about, a different approach becomes possible. This second strategy does not rely on collecting large labeled datasets or training a separate detector. Instead, it looks for statistical signals in the text, often in relation to how specific AI models generate language, to assess whether the text is likely to be AI-generated. For example, some methods examine the probability that an AI model assigns to a piece of text. If the model assigns an unusually high probability to the exact sequence of words, this can be a signal that the text was, in fact, generated by that model.

Finally, in the case of text that is generated by an AI system that embeds a watermark, the problem shifts from detection to verification. Using a secret key provided by the AI vendor, a verification tool can assess whether the text is consistent with having been generated by a watermarked system. This approach relies on information that is not available from the text alone, rather than on inferences drawn from the text itself.

Limitations of detection tools

Each family of tools comes with its own limitations, making it difficult to declare a clear winner. Learning-based detectors, for example, are sensitive to how closely new text resembles the data they were trained on. Their accuracy drops when the text differs substantially from the training corpus, which can quickly become outdated as new AI models are released. Continually curating fresh data and retraining detectors is costly, and detectors inevitably lag behind the systems they are meant to identify.

Statistical tests face a different set of constraints. Many rely on assumptions about how specific AI models generate text, or on access to those models’ probability distributions. When models are proprietary, frequently updated or simply unknown, these assumptions break down. As a result, methods that work well in controlled settings can become unreliable or inapplicable in the real world.

Watermarking shifts the problem from detection to verification, but it introduces its own dependencies. It relies on cooperation from AI vendors and applies only to text generated with watermarking enabled.

More broadly, AI text detection is part of an escalating arms race. Detection tools must be publicly available to be useful, but that same transparency enables evasion. As AI text generators grow more capable and evasion techniques more sophisticated, detectors are unlikely to gain a lasting upper hand.

Hard reality

The problem of AI text detection is simple to state but hard to solve reliably. Institutions with rules governing the use of AI-written text cannot rely on detection tools alone for enforcement.

As society adapts to generative AI, we are likely to refine norms around acceptable use of AI-generated text and improve detection techniques. But ultimately, we’ll have to learn to live with the fact that such tools will never be perfect.

Ambuj Tewari receives funding from NSF and NIH.

– ref. Why it’s so hard to tell if a piece of text was written by AI – even for AI – https://theconversation.com/why-its-so-hard-to-tell-if-a-piece-of-text-was-written-by-ai-even-for-ai-265181

Source: The Conversation – USA – By Alex Jensen, Postdoctoral Associate – Wildlife Ecology, North Carolina State University

Imagine a healthy forest, home to a variety of species: Birds are flitting between tree branches, salamanders are sliding through leaf litter, and wolves are tracking the scent of deer through the understory. Each of these animals has a role in the forest, and most ecologists would argue that losing any one of these species would be bad for the ecosystem as a whole.

Unfortunately – whether due to habitat loss, overhunting or introduced species – humans have made some species disappear. At the same time, other species have adapted to us and spread more widely.

As an ecologist, I’m curious about what these changes mean for ecosystems – can these newly arrived species functionally replace the species that used to be there? I studied this process in eastern North America, where some top predators have disappeared and a new predator has arrived.

A primer on predators

Wolves used to roam across every state east of the Mississippi River. But as the land was developed, many people viewed wolves as threats and wiped most of them out. These days, a mix of gray wolves and eastern wolves persist in Canada and around the Great Lakes, which I collectively refer to as northeastern wolves. There’s also a small population of red wolves – a distinct and smaller species of wolf – on the coast of North Carolina.

The disappearance of wolves may have given coyotes the opportunity they needed. Starting around 1900, coyotes began expanding their range east and have now colonized nearly all of eastern North America.

So are coyotes the new wolf? Can they fill the same ecological role that wolves used to? These are the questions I set out to answer in my paper published in August 2025 in the Stacks Journal. I focused on their role as predators – what they eat and how often they kill big herbivores, such as deer and moose.

What’s on the menu?

I started by reviewing every paper I could find on wolf or coyote diets, recording what percent of scat or stomach samples contained common food items such as deer, rabbits, small rodents or fruit. I compared northeastern wolf diets to northeastern coyote diets and red wolf diets to southeastern coyote diets.

I found two striking differences between wolf and coyote diets. First, wolves ate more medium-sized herbivores. In particular, they ate more beavers in the northeast and more nutria in the southeast. Both of these species are large aquatic rodents that influence ecosystems – beaver dam building changes how water moves, sometimes undesirably for land owners, while nutria are non-native and damaging to wetlands.

Second, wolves have narrower diets overall. They eat less fruit and fewer omnivores such as birds, raccoons and foxes, compared to coyotes. This means that coyotes are likely performing some ecological roles that wolves never did, such as dispersing fruit seeds in their poop and suppressing populations of smaller predators.

Killing deer and moose

But diet studies alone cannot tell the whole story – it’s usually impossible to tell whether coyotes killed or scavenged the deer they ate, for example. So I also reviewed every study I could find on ungulate mortality – these are studies that tag deer or moose, track their survival, and attribute a cause of death if they die.

These studies revealed other important differences between wolves and coyotes. For example, wolves were responsible for a substantial percentage of moose deaths – 19% of adults and 40% of calves – while none of the studies documented coyotes killing moose. This means that all, or nearly all, of moose in coyote diets is scavenged.

Coyotes are adept predators of deer, however. In the northeast, they killed more white-tailed deer fawns than wolves did, 28% compared to 15%, and a similar percentage of adult deer, 18% compared to 22%. In the southeast, coyotes killed 40% of fawns but only 6% of adults.

Rarely killing adult deer in the southeast could have implications for other members of the ecological community. For example, after killing an adult ungulate, many large predators leave some of the carcass behind, which can be an important source of food for scavengers. Although there is no data on how often red wolves kill adult deer, it is likely that coyotes are not supplying food to scavengers to the same extent that red wolves do.

Are coyotes the new wolves?

So what does this all mean? It means that although coyotes eat some of the same foods, they cannot fully replace wolves. Differences between wolves and coyotes were particularly pronounced in the northeast, where coyotes rarely killed moose or beavers. Coyotes in the southeast were more similar to red wolves, but coyotes likely killed fewer nutria and adult deer.

The return of wolves could be a natural solution for regions where wildlife managers desire a reduction in moose, beaver, nutria or deer populations.

Yet even with the aid of reintroductions, wolves will likely never fully recover their former range in eastern North America – there are too many people. Coyotes, on the other hand, do quite well around people. So even if wolves never fully recover, at least coyotes will be in those places partially filling the role that wolves once had.

Indeed, humans have changed the world so much that it may be impossible to return to the way things were before people substantially changed the planet. While some restoration will certainly be possible, researchers can continue to evaluate the extent to which new species can functionally replace missing species.

Alex Jensen does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

– ref. With wolves absent from most of eastern North America, can coyotes replace them? – https://theconversation.com/with-wolves-absent-from-most-of-eastern-north-america-can-coyotes-replace-them-270235