The Rise of Coyotes Spreads Lyme Disease

Coyote in Shenandoah National Park.  Video of coyotes 10 blocks from my house.

Scientific American reports that the spread of coyotes is driving the spread of Lyme Disease:

As coyotes take over their ranges in North America, red fox populations are plummeting, and researchers have found one surprising result: The drop is fueling the spread of Lyme disease.

Lyme disease cases have increased enormously in recent years: From 1997 to 2007, the number of cases increased by 380 percent in Minnesota, 280 percent in Wisconsin and 1,300 percent in Virginia. Researchers used to think the increases were due to increasing deer populations, since deer are an important host to the disease-causing bacteria. However, the new data show these increases were independent of deer population levels.

"Increases in Lyme disease in the Northeastern and Midwestern United States over the past three decades are frequently uncorrelated with deer abundance and instead coincide with a range-wide decline of a key small-mammal predator, the red fox, likely due to expansion of coyote populations," the researchers write today (June 18) in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"We found that where there once was an abundance of red foxes, there is now an abundance of coyotes," said study researcher Taal Levi, who completed the study as a part of his graduate work at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

I cannot say I am too surprised.  As I have noted in the past, red fox are a healthy engine of mouse destruction. It is not deer that are the problem with Lyme disease, so much as it is mice which are the core host.

The good news is that Lyme is actually harder to catch than most people think, and easier to cure too. Doxycycline is easy and cheap to acquire without a prescription, and useful for quite a lot.
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