08/22/2026
Interesting article!
GPS-collared mountain lions in south-central New Mexico killed 84 coyotes across four years of monitoring. Coyotes were their second most common prey after mule deer, ahead of beavers, raccoons, carp, and African gemsbok. One in every eight kills a mountain lion made in the Chihuahuan Desert was a coyote. Nobody expected the animal most people think of as the dominant canid predator in the West to show up as routine prey for the cat living above it.
Prude and colleagues published the dataset in Wildlife Biology in 2021 after investigating 1,073 GPS location clusters from collared pumas at the Armendaris Ranch and Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge along the Rio Grande in south-central New Mexico between 2014 and 2018. Of those clusters, 686 turned out to be kill sites. The researchers hiked to each one, identified the prey species from the remains, and built the most detailed prey composition profile ever assembled for mountain lions in the Chihuahuan Desert. Thirty-two different species appeared on the list. Mule deer led at 195 kills. Coyotes came second at 84.
The number is large enough to rule out opportunism. A mountain lion that kills a coyote once or twice during a multi-year study may have stumbled onto one at a carcass or encountered one at a water source. Eighty-four kills across 686 total represents a consistent pattern. The pumas were hunting coyotes deliberately and regularly, treating a 30-pound canid predator as a food source the same way they treated a 30-pound beaver or a 15-pound raccoon.
Most of the coyote kills were not associated with cached prey from other species. Twenty-one of 24 investigated coyote kill sites contained only the coyote. The puma had not killed a deer, attracted a scavenging coyote, and killed the scavenger. It had gone after the coyote as the primary target. The coyote was the meal, not a bystander at someone else's.
The rest of the prey list reads like an inventory of everything living along the Rio Grande corridor. Beavers at 70 kills. Raccoons at 51. Common carp at 49, meaning mountain lions in the Chihuahuan Desert were walking into the river and catching fish. Gemsbok, the African antelope that New Mexico released onto White Sands Missile Range in the 1960s, appeared at 35 kills. One mature male puma killed 29 adult gemsbok during the study period, comprising 58 percent of his total documented kills. That single cat had specialized in killing a 450-pound antelope armed with 34-inch spear-like horns capable of killing a lion in Africa. He killed 29 of them.
The dietary breadth tells a story about what a mountain lion actually is versus what most people assume it is. The popular image is a deer specialist, a solitary cat that stalks mule deer through the mountains and eats little else. The New Mexico data showed an animal eating 32 species ranging from carp and waterfowl to adult gemsbok weighing four times what the cat weighed. The mountain lion is not a specialist. It is a generalist predator that kills whatever the landscape holds, and in south-central New Mexico the landscape holds coyotes at a density high enough that killing them regularly is worth the effort.
The coyote kills also carried an ecological implication the researchers noted. Mountain lion predation on coyotes is a form of intraguild predation, a larger predator killing a smaller one. Where mountain lions are present and active, coyote populations may be suppressed not through competition for food but through direct killing. The 84 coyotes removed from the New Mexico study area across four years represent a measurable reduction in a mesopredator whose own prey, rabbits, ground-nesting birds, and rodents, may benefit from the coyote's absence. The mountain lion eating the coyote may be indirectly protecting the coyote's prey without intending to.
Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: Prude et al. (2021), Wildlife Biology / Armendaris Ranch / Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge / BioOne.
