The Alcatraz coyote's origin story just got a plot twist—and a longer swim, the San Francisco Chronicle reports. The National Park Service said Monday that DNA testing shows the lone animal that appeared on the former prison island in January most likely came from Angel Island, not San Francisco, as experts first suspected. The swim from San Francisco is about one mile, while the swim from Angel Island is double that, the AP reports.
Genetic analysis of scat collected on Alcatraz linked the male coyote to Angel Island's population, according to UC Davis' Mammalian and Ecology Unit of the Veterinary Genetics Laboratory. That means he likely crossed a wider, colder, and more turbulent stretch of San Francisco Bay than the shorter route from the city. (Of the 36 men who attempted to escape Alcatraz when it was still a prison, all were either caught or didn't survive the swim.)
Biologists set up trail cameras and audio recorders after the Jan. 24 sighting but never spotted him again, and there's no sign he's still on Alcatraz. The animal's brief visit raised alarms because the island is a nesting site for seabirds; officials had readied capture-and-relocation plans if he stuck around. "We don't know what happened to the coyote," park wildlife ecologist Bill Merkle says, adding he hopes the "expert swimmer" made it back to Angel Island, a state park that was once an immigrant processing and detention center. Coyotes only recently established territory there, SFGate reports.
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