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human behavior.
Biologist Numi Mitchell is president of The Conservation Agency, a Jamestown-based scientific not-for-profit. She had been working on habitat restoration in Turks and Caicos for the endangered rock iguana when life circumstances recentered her research in Rhode Island on one of the state’ s most abundant species: coyotes. Over the last century, the adaptable and socially organized Canis latrans has spread from the Midwestern prairies to the entire continental United States. They arrived here in the mid-1960s and have flourished.
“ We wanted to look at exactly how the species is using the components of their ecosystem— the biological community and the physical components.” Like all predators, coyotes’ population size is linked to food resources and competition, Mitchell says.“ If we could identify what resources were making them abundant, we could potentially control coyote numbers passively.”
In 2005, the Narragansett Bay Coyote Study began trapping coyotes on Aquid-
neck and Conanicut islands and outfitting them with technologically advanced GPS collars that provided real-time tracking to see where they sheltered, traveled, mated and foraged. After a year, the maps of daytime, nighttime and twilight pathways looked like the“ cocoon of a silkworm, something that was very tightly woven,” Mitchell says, with lines marking the boundaries of a pack’ s territory and inter-
PHOTOGRAPHY: COURTESY OF THE CONSERVATION AGENCY / NARRAGANSETT BAY COYOTE STUDY.
FRAMING THAT RESONATES QUALITY DESIGNERS TRUST
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