Chances are you know someone whose life has been touched by adoption. Each year, about 135,000 children are adopted by families in the U.S. In honor of World Adoption Day and National Adoption Day both taking place this week, here are 12 people who grew up to become famous figures after finding their permanent homes.

1. GERALD FORD

The 38th President of the United States was born in 1913 and named Leslie Lynch King Jr. after his biological father, but his parents separated soon after his birth. His mother remarried when her son was 2, and legally changed his name to reflect that of his new father: Gerald Rudolph Ford Jr. He was adopted and was a preteen when he found out Ford Sr. wasn’t his birth father. “It didn’t make a big impression on me at the time,” Ford once said. “I didn’t understand exactly what a stepfather was. Dad and I had the closest, most intimate relationship. We acted alike. We had the same interests. I thought we looked alike.” He finally met his biological father, who came looking for him when he was in high school, but felt that his true bond was with his stepfather, the only father he actually knew.

2. STEVE JOBS

The Apple visionary was born in 1955 to an unmarried couple from the Midwest. His biological mother’s family didn’t approve of their relationship (his biological father was a Syrian Muslim immigrant), so she moved to San Francisco, had her baby in secret, and put him up for adoption. Paul and Clara Jobs adopted Steve, but only after they signed a pledge that his birth mother insisted on—that the child would attend college. Jobs never met his biological father, and he frequently corrected anyone who didn’t refer to Paul and Clara as his “real parents.” “They were my real parents,” he said. “1000 percent.”

3. SARAH MCLACHLAN

When Sarah McLachlan—the Canadian singer famous for her hit songs like “Angel” and founding Lilith Fair—was about 9 years old, she was told that she’d been adopted shortly after she was born. She’s said it never bothered her because she loved her parents and was too young to fully understand. Her birth mother was a 19-year-old artist in Nova Scotia who would have struggled to raise her child, and though McLachlan did eventually meet her, she’s said she is glad that they both had the opportunity to go on and live their dreams.

4. DARRYL MCDANIELS

One of the founding members of hip hop group Run–D.M.C., Darryl McDaniels was adopted as a baby—but he didn’t find out until he was 35. While writing his autobiography, he called his parents to ask them for details about the day he was born. They revealed to him that they had adopted him when he was just 1 month old. (His wife had always teased him that he didn’t look like anyone in his family, and suddenly they knew why.) The revelation deeply affected him; he had already struggled with some depression in his life, had recently lost his dear friend and bandmate Jam Master Jay, and McDaniels was drinking heavily and even considered suicide (he actually credits Sarah McLachlan’s song “Angel” with getting him through his darkest days). He worked to get through it, and documented his search for his birth mother in a VH1 documentary, DMC: My Adoption Journey, in 2006. They were reunited when he was 41.

5. DAVE THOMAS

Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy’s, was adopted as a baby. He was raised mainly by his adoptive father and grandmother after losing his adoptive mother at 5 and two stepmothers before he was 10. In 1990, President George H.W. Bush asked him to spearhead a national campaign to encourage people to adopt or foster children, and to help businesses understand the importance of offering adoption benefits. Two years later he created the Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption, dedicated to increasing the number of children placed each year. He testified before Congress in support of adoption tax credits and helped in the creation of an adoption postage stamp that was issued by the U.S. Postal Service in 2000.

6. FAITH HILL

The country singer knew she was adopted from a young age but was told she had been given up because her birth mother had an affair with a married man who wouldn’t leave his wife for her. In reality, the couple did get married and had another child whom they kept. Hill learned the truth when she tracked down her birth mom shortly after she moved to Nashville to pursue a career as a singer. She says that despite loving her family and being happy she was adopted, there was a feeling that something was missing from her life. “I was adopted into this incredible home, a loving, positive environment, yet I had this yearning, this kind of darkness that was also inside me,” she has said. She was awed by her first meeting with her biological mother, who looked just like her.

7. JAMIE FOXX

The Academy Award-winning actor is actually a second-generation adoptee; his mother was adopted as well. He was officially adopted by his maternal grandparents after his parents decided they couldn’t handle having a child when he was 7 months old. His grandmother was 60 when she took him in, and he publicly thanked her in his 2005 Oscar acceptance speech. In 2003 he appeared on “A Home for the Holidays,” a Dave Thomas Foundation for Adoption CBS special where he shared his adoption story and encouraged others to adopt or foster as well.

8. DEBBIE HARRY

The Blondie singer was born in 1945 and adopted when she was 3 months old. Her parents told her when she was 4 and she says that they did it in a way that made her feel “quite special.” When she was a teenager she used to fantasize that her birth mother was Marilyn Monroe. Harry says that she thinks her being adopted might be why she is so adventurous, since she felt it didn’t give her any limitations. “I sometimes attribute my, uh, adventurous nature to that… I have an open mind about things,” Harry has said. “It didn’t present me with any borders.”

9. GEORGE WASHINGTON CARVER

The famous African-American scientist was born into slavery in Missouri shortly before the end of the Civil War, although the exact year and date are unknown. He was one of many children born to the only two slaves owned by the Carver family, who were farmers. Almost immediately after his birth, he, his mother, and a sister were kidnapped by raiders. But the Carvers sent someone to look for them and only the infant George was recovered. Once slavery was abolished, they raised him and one of his brothers, James, as their own.

10. RAY LIOTTA

The Goodfellas actor was born in 1954, and given up for adoption at 6 months old, after his unmarried birth parents realized they couldn’t afford to raise him. His adoptive parents told him about it when he was very young, and he even did a presentation on being adopted as a kindergartner. But when Liotta got older and was going to have a child of his own, he worried about what genetic traits they might inherit, so he sought to find his birth mother. “I found my birth mother and found out I have, not an identical twin, but a half brother, five half sisters and a full sister that I didn’t know about until 15 years ago,” he said in 2014. When his biological mom found out the son she gave up was now a famous actor he said she had “a whole different bounce to her voice.” But Liotta remains grateful that he was adopted, though he admits that he struggled with feelings of being given up at times.

11. FRANCES MCDORMAND

McDormand, the Oscar-winning Fargo actress, was adopted by a minister and his wife as an infant. She doesn’t know who her biological mother was, though she was given the opportunity to meet her when she was 18; ultimately she did correspond with her, but decided not to pursue a relationship. McDormand has discussed her adoption and how angry the knowledge of her abandonment makes her feel, but she has also said, “It’s subjective, and every adopted person comes to it differently.” And that also includes her own son—she and husband Joel Coen chose to adopt their child, Pedro, from Paraguay. “And my son will deal with it in his own way,” she said.

12. KEEGAN-MICHAEL KEY

The actor and comedian—and one-half of comedy duo Key & Peele—was born to a white woman and her married black co-worker; he was adopted as a baby by another biracial couple. In 1996, at age 25, he found his birth mother. He calls it one of “the most unexpected and crucial and significant and foundational things” that happened in his life. He also says it is the reason he now has such a strong faith. When he met her, he listened to her life story and how she came to give him up for adoption, and then he says he suddenly found himself crying and accepting Jesus Christ as his Lord and Savior. “So, that was pretty unexpected,” he said. “It’s one of the touchstones in both my spiritual and personal life.”

Bike-sharing systems are everywhere these days, but most people don’t make a habit out of carrying a helmet. To keep cyclists safe, LiveScience reports that a designer, Isis Shiffer, has created a collapsible head protector made from cardboard that can be sold in vending machines and fit easily inside a bag. Shiffer was recently named the winner of this year’s James Dyson Award, an international student design award that’s given to undergraduates or recent graduates.

The EcoHelmet is made from 100 percent cardboard, and it’s coated in a material that makes it resistant to water. The secret to its protective powers lies in its honeycomb pattern, which can absorb the impact of a crash. It’s designed to cost less than $5, and it’s also biodegradable, so cyclists can purchase it—and dispose of it—without guilt.

Shiffer, an avid cyclist, was inspired to create the EcoHelmet after utilizing bike-sharing programs around the globe. “When I was exploring new cities I had no access to a helmet and I didn’t want to spend $30 buying one,” the designer told the BBC.

Shiffer was awarded £30,000 (about $37,000) to refine the helmet’s design. She hopes to pilot it in New York in spring 2017, and might initially provide it to bike-share users for free. Watch how it works in the video below, courtesy of Dezeen.

[h/t LiveScience]

New moms just cannot win. Two new studies published in the journal Maternal & Child Nutrition find that women are criticized when they don’t breastfeed—and even when they do.

Everybody—friends, family, strangers, advertisers, public health officials—wants to tell new mothers what to do. Some of those people are qualified to make recommendations. But those recommendations, while created with the best intentions, don’t always take real-world experience into consideration.

Current recommendations from the National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the World Health Organization (WHO) are firm: women should exclusively breastfeed their babies for the first six months of their lives. There’s plenty of science to back this idea up; breast milk is a super-duper superfood, providing an infant with nutrients, helpful bacteria, and immune-boosting antibodies and proteins. Scores of studies have linked formula feeding with poor health, obesity, and disease risk. In an expert’s ideal world, every baby would be exclusively breastfed.

But we don’t live in an ideal world. We live in a world where breastfeeding is undesirable or downright impossible for many women. It’s a physically demanding and time-consuming endeavor that’s become more common among upper-class women who have the resources to spare. There’s a strong link between formula feeding and poverty, and it’s not because poorer women don’t also want the best for their babies.

Myriad studies have investigated the breastfeeding/formula divide, asking who’s doing it and why. But few have asked how women feel about the way they feed their babies or how it affects the way people treat them. So researchers at the UK’s University of Liverpool conducted two surveys: one of 679 women who at least partially breastfed their babies, and another of 601 women who used infant formula. They asked the women about their current feeding practices and if those differed from the ideas about feeding they’d had while pregnant. They asked how they felt about the way they fed their babies and how they felt other people treated them because of it.

As expected, formula feeding came with some real emotional baggage. The authors note “a worryingly high percentage of mothers experienced negative emotions as a result of their decision to use formula.” Sixty-seven percent of respondent said they felt guilty; 68 percent felt stigmatized, and 76 percent felt the need to defend their choice to others.

But even women who breastfed were stressed by, and judged for, their choice. Fifteen percent of nursing mothers said they felt guilty; 38 percent of nursing mothers felt stigmatized, and 55 percent found themselves defending their decision. Some of their guilt came from introducing formula after breastfeeding. Others felt bad about returning to work while their baby was still nursing. They felt bad that they were neglecting other family members and stigmatized when breastfeeding in public. Women in both studies felt judged by doctors, family members, the media, and other parents. They simply could not catch a break.

Co-author Victoria Fallon notes that less than 1 percent of British women actually breastfeed their infants for a full six months. “We need social reform to fully support and protect those mothers who do breastfeed,” she said in a statement, “and a different approach to promotion to minimise negative emotions among the majority who don’t.”

She notes that well-intentioned public health recommendations can still contribute to stigma, shame, and guilt. “The ‘breast is best’ message has, in many cases, done more harm than good,” she said, “and we need to be very careful of the use of words in future breastfeeding promotion campaigns. It is crucial that future recommendations recognize the challenges that exclusive breast feeding to six months brings and provide a more balanced and realistic target for mothers.”

At this point, it’s kind of crazy not to have Amazon Prime. The yearly subscription service comes with endless perks, from free shipping to streaming excellent shows like Transparent. If the $99 price tag seems like just too much for the ability to have almost anything in existence (truly anything) mailed to you in two days, we have some good news for you: For today only, Amazon is lowering the price of Prime by 20 percent. 

Friday, November 18, Prime will only be $79 starting at 12 a.m. ET until 11:59 p.m. PT. To get the deal, sign up on this landing page. Amazon launched the deal in celebration of its new show, The Grand Tour. On top of getting to watch the automotive show, Prime users also get Amazon Prime Video, Prime Music, Prime Reading, Prime Fresh, and Prime Photos. It’s going to be hard to see the TV over all the loot that’s going to get mailed to your door. 

[h/t Thrillist]

Mental Floss has affiliate relationships with certain retailers, including Amazon, and may receive a small percentage of any sale. But we only get commission on items you buy and don’t return, so we’re only happy if you’re happy. Good luck deal hunting!

Ten years ago, Jessica Carrero was walking in the Bronx’s Van Cortlandt Park when what looked like a dog burst out of the woods and ran down the trail in front of her. But as she watched the animal, the New York City Department of Parks and Recreation ranger could tell that it was no dog. “It didn’t have a collar and it didn’t move in a way that dogs move,” she says. “It wasn’t nervous or excited—it seemed to move with a sense of purpose, knowing exactly where it was going.” A year earlier, she’d very briefly seen a similar looking animal in Pelham Bay Park. At the time, she wondered, Could that be a coyote? Then she second guessed herself. Back then, “it wasn’t confirmed that [coyotes were living] here,” she says. “I thought, ‘That had to be a stray dog. Coyotes just aren’t in New York City.’” But with this sighting, there could be no doubt: Though the animals’ presence in the Bronx had not yet been confirmed, Carrero was looking at a Canis latrans.

Since that day 10 years ago, coyotes have firmly established themselves in New York City; they’ve been spotted everywhere from the Upper West Side to Battery Park City, from the rooftop of a Queens bar to Rikers Island, and they’re breeding in the Bronx’s parks. And Carrero—who was born and raised in the Bronx and has been with the park service for 15 years—has had plenty of confirmed encounters with the animals. She isn’t just on call to help relocate coyotes from residential backyards to wooded park lands—she’s also spotted them on the trails of parks in the Bronx. Once, she saw three pups playing in Pelham Bay Park; another time, she and two workers scared two coyotes away from a rabbit the canids had likely been hunting. “We saved the rabbit’s life,” she says, chuckling.

Many of her colleagues haven’t ever spotted a coyote, but Carrero estimates that she’s seen the animals nine times during her tenure with the park service. “I just have good luck,” she says.

Nine might not seem like all that many given the fact that Carrero and her colleagues spend most of their time walking the parks, but it suddenly becomes a lot when you compare it to the number of sightings scientists Mark Weckel and Chris Nagy have had between the two of them: five. (Two for Weckel, three for Nagy.) Which is a shame, considering that the pair spend their time studying New York City’s burgeoning coyote population as co-founders of the Gotham Coyote Project.

Founded in 2011, the project started with a simple question: Where are coyotes? The scope has expanded since then, says Weckel, whose day job is manager of the Science Research Mentoring Program at the American Museum of Natural History. Nagy is director of research at the Mianus River Gorge.

“From that time,” Weckel says, “we’ve expanded to questions like: How many are there? What are their genetic relationships? What impact could they have on the ecology of New York City?”

To answer those questions, the project has recruited scientists from universities and museums and enlisted the help of interns and volunteers. They’re in constant communication with Carrero and the Parks Department, and twice a year, they set up trail cams in New York City parks where coyotes have been sighted in the hopes of catching a glimpse of the elusive animals. But eyewitness reports and trail cam photos can only tell scientists so much—namely, where coyotes are. To answer the tougher questions—how the animals are related, and what they’re eating—the scientists rely on poop.

 
Up to about 200 years ago, the coyote inhabited the western part of North America, from southern Canada to northern Mexico and from the Mississippi west to California. But as humans cleared forests for fields and eliminated apex predators like the eastern wolf and eastern cougar, the coyote expanded its range in all directions, adapting to, and thriving in, every new environment. Their new territory, stretching from Alaska as far south as Panama and to the eastern seaboard, marks a range expansion of at least 40 percent.

By the 1980s, the animals were breeding in New York State—everywhere except New York City and Long Island. And in the mid-’90s, coyotes made their move.

New York City consists of five boroughs: the Bronx, Manhattan, Staten Island, Brooklyn, and Queens. Staten Island and Manhattan are islands, and both Brooklyn and Queens are located on Long Island; the Bronx is the sole borough attached to the mainland United States, so it makes sense that first modern coyote sighting in New York City would be there. It occurred in February 1995, when the animal—a female—ran out onto the Major Deegan Expressway in the Bronx and was hit by a car (a statue was later erected in her honor). Another coyote was found shot in Van Cortlandt Park the next week, and yet another popped up not long after in Woodlawn Cemetery. By 2011, the coyote had established breeding populations in the Bronx, and these days, they pop up around the city to major fanfare.

Now, there’s just one last large landmass left to conquer: Long Island (including Brooklyn and Queens). Individuals have made the journey—either crossing bridges, using tunnels, or swimming across bodies of water to get there—but there aren’t currently any breeding populations in the area. Yet.

That fact, which came to Weckel’s attention when he was a graduate student at the City University of New York, directly inspired the Gotham Coyote Project. When the native New Yorker realized that no one was studying these coyotes, he jumped at the chance to do it: “You very rarely get a chance to understand what the first few individuals of a new population are doing.”

The group decided to find out as much about the animals as possible using one resource that was readily available to them. To find coyote poop, you have to go to where the coyotes are—so on a hot July morning, mental_floss headed up to Van Cortlandt Park to help Nagy and four interns in the search.

 
From far away, coyote scat doesn’t look all that different from dog poop. But get closer, and you’ll start to see some discrepancies. Dog poop is homogenous, but coyote scat might contain sticks and stones, seeds and broken bones—and it might be more than a little fuzzy thanks to the fur from its kills.

We meet up with Nagy, the interns, and Nagy’s dog, Ethan—a small black-and-tan pup that he and a friend trained to sniff for scat—near Van Cortlandt’s horse stables, then take a short car ride to the section of the park Nagy wants to search. We walk in together, then split up into pairs to cover more ground.

Coyotes often poop right next to the trails people use—no need to tromp off into the woods to find scat—and most people who walk by piles in Van Cortlandt Park aren’t giving them a second glance. But we walk with our eyes trained on the ground, closely examining every brownish lump we find. It rained the night before, making soft objects indistinct; more than once, the potential poop turns out to be a rotten stick.

In theory, when Ethan picks up the right scent, he dwells over the spot. He usually finds at least one scat while on the hunt. “If I was doing this from scratch, I’d go to the pound and just get the most hyperactive OCD dog,” Nagy says. “Usually you just run a tennis ball up and down a fence, and if they go absolutely crazy for it, that’s your dog. My dog’s a little harder to please. He knows what we’re there for, and he does it—as long as there’s not a squirrel around.”

As temperatures soar into the 90s, it becomes too hot for Ethan to do his work. He’s panting, not sniffing with his nose, and every chipmunk (there are a lot of them in the Bronx) is a distraction. No amount of treats will get him back on task. After four hours of searching—during which we cover more than five miles—we pack it up and head back to the park entrance.

Nagy and Ethan came up empty, but one of the interns has a good eye for poop; she finds two samples. (Nagy has calculated that it takes around eight human hours to find a single scat, as compared to a dog’s four.) On a paper bag, she writes the park’s initials, the scat’s GPS coordinates, and her initials. After some discussion about how to scoop up the poop—Nagy has forgotten plastic gloves—another intern uses a second paper bag to pick it up and deposit it in the marked-up bag. Finally, she drops in a couple of packets of dessicant, which will dry the sample out.

Nagy puts the samples in his backpack. From here, he’ll deposit them in a cool, dry area under his porch until he has time to take them up to the lab. Then he calls it a day; it’s simply too hot to search anymore.

When any creature defecates, it leaves behind cells on the surface of its waste. In those cells is DNA, which will reveal to researchers how New York City’s coyotes are related. This is where Carol Henger comes in. The Fordham University Ph.D. student can often be found in the lab, carefully scraping cells off coyote poop and analyzing them for DNA.

A former zookeeper—she cared for primates at the Bronx Zoo for 10 years—Henger had no idea there were coyotes in New York City when she decided to pursue a doctorate in biology. During the course of researching schools, she came across the website of her current advisor, Jason Munshi-South. “He had a clip where he was giving a TED Talk and he mentioned coyotes were in New York City,” she says. “I was surprised. And I was like, ‘I have to study this.’” Munshi-South was helping the Gotham Coyote Project collect scat to analyze it for DNA. Henger wanted in.

The scat comes to Henger in paper bags marked with details of where the samples were collected. If the scat is frozen—as it might be if the sample was moist when it was collected—it goes in the freezer. If it’s dry, she pops it into the filing cabinet she has converted for that purpose. “You really want to make sure a sample is dried out before you store it, or else it can get moldy,” she says.

When it’s time to process a sample, Henger removes it from storage and, using disposable plastic forceps, takes it out of the bag and places it on a sterilized petri dish. Next, she uses a scalpel to scrape off a tiny area of the outside of the scat. “I look for darker portions of the scat,” Henger says. “Anything furry will be prey DNA; dark areas have high fecal content,” which is where the coyote’s cells would be. She puts the scraping in a small test tube and fills it with lysis buffer, a solution that breaks open cells so scientists can analyze their compounds. After shaking the sample a bit, she puts it in an incubator and waits for the cells to open up—a process that, depending on the age of the specimen, can take anywhere from one to 12 hours. (To guard against contamination, everything from the petri dishes to the scalpel is single use and either thrown away or sterilized after it touches the scat. Henger also wipes down her work bench between processing scats.)

Once the cells are broken open, Henger adds Proteinase K, an enzyme that degrades the protein. “It can get in the way of extracting DNA,” she says. Centrifuging the sample will allow her to remove the liquid containing the proteins.

Finally, she adds an elution buffer, a solvent that binds to the DNA, and then stores that sample until it’s time for analysis. “I take a little bit of DNA from the tube, and then I add primers to it,” Henger says. “Primers are short segments of DNA, and they’ll bind to other strands of DNA in the coyote samples.” Next, she adds polymerase, an enzyme that starts a chain reaction. The primers will amplify 11 different markers—two of which indicate the sex of the animal—in the DNA (she uses another set of markers to determine whether the scat came from a coyote or just a domestic dog or red fox). “Those markers are variable among individuals,” Henger says, “and that gives me a unique genotype for each coyote.”

Henger has processed approximately 200 New York City scat samples since summer 2010, and the research is still ongoing; some of the processed samples, for example, didn’t reveal enough genetic information to identify individual coyotes. Still, she says, there are some preliminary findings. “Looking at 2010 to 2016, the samples that were collected those years, I have 20 individual genotypes,” she says. “Most of those—around 14—came from Pelham Bay Park, which is our most heavily sampled park just because it’s the biggest.” There are 35 identified individual coyotes in all: Most come from parks in the Bronx (Pelham Bay, Riverdale, Van Cortlandt, Ferry Point Park, Pugsley Creek), one sample comes from Inwood, and the rest come from Queens.

According to her DNA analysis, the coyotes are highly related. For example, the sole coyote resident of a small park in Queens—a male the researchers have nicknamed Frankie, who was first spotted in the park in 2009—shares DNA with male coyotes whose scat was collected in Pelham Bay Park and Pugsley Creek (around 16 miles and 18 miles from the park in Queens, respectively). “He is second-order related (shares 25 percent of his DNA) to two male coyotes,” Henger says. “First-order relatedness indicates a parent-offspring or full sibling relationship—we can’t tell if it’s parent/offspring or sibling. Second-order relatedness indicates a half-sibling, an aunt or uncle to a niece or nephew, or a grandparent-grandchild relationship.”

There is a lot of first-order relatedness within parks and across parks, “which makes me think of offspring dispersing to a different park, trying to set up their new territory,” Henger says. “The fact that we’re seeing them moving through the city to get to different parks is a good sign, because it means they are able to move—they’re not getting stuck in this high level of urbanization.” They have high genetic diversity, too, which indicates that outside coyotes are coming in and keeping the gene pool fresh.

These coyotes are hybrids that carry wolf genes, although Nagy and Weckel prefer the term “Northeastern coyote” over the more popular “coywolf” portmanteau. That phrasing “makes it seem very simple, as if the animal you’re talking about is half coyote, half wolf, and it’s not,” Weckel says. But the animals aren’t a subspecies of wolf: According to The New York Times, a recent study confirmed that the gray wolf is the only true wolf species in North America. The “two other purported species, the Eastern wolf and the red wolf, are mixes of gray wolf and coyote DNA.”

In the future, Henger would like to collaborate with researchers outside of New York City to figure out where the coyotes came from. “My hypothesis,” she says, “is that a lot of these guys came from an initial population that settled in Pelham Bay, probably from Westchester”—more than 20 miles north of Pelham Bay—“and then they’ve been dispersing from there to other parks.” She also plans to use the data she’s compiling to create a landscape model that will help her determine which corridors the coyotes are using to get around. “That would be important in terms of conservation,” she says. “We may want to conserve that area of connectivity from development.”

When Henger is finished with the scat, its journey isn’t over. Next up is an hour-long subway ride to the American Museum of Natural History, where scientists and their interns will process the poop. They start by making what they call scat tea.

 
Poop can give us DNA, which shows coyote relatedness—but that’s not all it can tell us. Analyzing the contents of poop also reveals what this new population is eating. Figuring that out falls to Neil Duncan, collections manager of the mammalogy department at AMNH, and four high school students with the museum’s Science Research Mentoring Program (SRMP). “They’re spending hours and hours that I don’t always have,” he says. “With four people working, it’s an extra day every week of research that I wouldn’t get to do.”

The students—all of them young women—were not aware they’d be dealing with poop when they signed up for the program, but it didn’t freak them out. “I thought it was cool because it was about coyotes in New York City,” 18-year-old Olivia Asher tells mental_floss when we pop by the museum to take a look at their research. “The unpleasant part doesn’t outweigh the cool part of it.”

And so they’ve spent the school year donning latex gloves and processing poop. First, they place the scat—each of which has an identifying number that corresponds to a data sheet—in the foot of a nylon stocking. (Asher pulls out a box of L’eggs Everyday Knee Highs. “They can’t be the leg, they have to just be the foot,” she explains; cutting the stockings would fray them and make them difficult to use.) Next, the stocking scat is dunked in a bucket of water, massaged to break up the poop, and “steeped” by placing it in a bucket of water, where it’s left to soak overnight, creating the so-called “scat tea.” The next day, they remove the prey matter from the stocking and put it in a sieve to run it under water, which, according to 17-year-old Rita Rozovskiy, “isolates the prey items and eliminates the fecal matrix.” Translation: The poop melts away, leaving just what the coyote ate behind.

The team separates classes of prey items into separate vials—hair in one, bone fragments in another, and so on—numbered to identify which scat it came from. They then try to identify the prey items; to do it, they rely heavily on AMNH’s collection of study skins and skeletons. Looking at the scale (exterior) and medullary (interior) patterns of hair helps them identify some species, while looking at the incisors and molars in the scat helps them ID others. Bone fragments help them narrow down the size class of the species they are looking for. But just one identifier wouldn’t do; they can’t declare a prey item identified until they have multiple lines of evidence.

It is difficult, painstaking work. Identifying scale patterns, for example, requires the students to slather nail polish on a slide, drop in a hair, and wait for a moment; after carefully removing the hair, they look at the scale pattern under a microscope and use a guide to figure out what animal it is. Asher spent nearly a month trying to identify a single hair that turned out to be from a coyote. But, according to Duncan, her time wasn’t wasted—it was all part of the scientific process. He said that the students asked each other, “Yes, it’s coyote, but do you think it ate a coyote?” The answer: probably not. “Look at the evidence: It’s a single hair,” he says. “It wasn’t a clump of hair. Whether it was play, grooming behavior—who knows.”

The team processed 49 scat samples over the course of the school year, and although their results are preliminary, and by no means complete, so far they’ve found that New York City’s coyotes enjoy a very diverse diet. Mostly, they’re eating small mammals like squirrels, muskrats, meadow voles, and rabbits, which make up 19 percent of what was found in the scat, followed by birds (17 percent) and deer (14 percent; deer was only found in scat collected in Pelham Bay Park, which has a robust deer population). Fruit and seed were found in 13 percent of the scats.

“Surprisingly, trash was not a big portion of the diet, [which] we expected because there’s a lot of trash in New York,” 17-year-old Sandra Lewocki explains. But analysis of diet studies conducted in other urban areas reveals that anthropogenic items aren’t a big part of any urban coyote’s diet. The comparison also revealed that New York City’s coyotes appear to eat more birds than other urban coyotes do.

The team hasn’t found any rats, either, but as Duncan points out, “it certainly doesn’t mean that they’re not in there.” He told the students that, once they positively identified the hair of one species, they should go through all of their samples and pull out similar looking hairs. “So these large numbers of muskrats or squirrels are part of our surveying technique,” he says. “I think rats will come, we just haven’t found any yet.”

Duncan will continue to do prey analysis with Asher—who stayed on after her internship ended last summer—and two new SRMP students. “What’s going to be interesting is, as we find out the diet of these coyotes in Queens, and if they move into Brooklyn and thereon to Long Island, [we’ll see] how the diet is going to differ across these more urban geographic areas,” he says. “I think that’s going to be a significant part of the story.”

Make no mistake: Though Long Island has not yet been colonized by coyotes, colonization is inevitable. (There is currently one resident; a family pack that once lived there has since dispersed.) Thanks to high birth rates and their incredible ability to adapt to situations and landscapes, attempts to eradicate the animals end in failure. We couldn’t get rid of them if we tried—and Americans have tried. According to National Geographic, in the 1920s, the Bureau of Biological Survey—which had pretty much gotten rid of wolves—began a campaign to eradicate coyotes using poison. Between 1947 and 1956, the agency killed about 6.5 million coyotes in the West. As Dan Flores, author of Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History, explained, “When they’re persecuted, they tend to abandon the pack strategy and scatter across the landscape in singles and pairs. And the poison campaign was one of the things that kept scattering them across North America.” Normal litter sizes, he said, are five or six pups, but “When their populations are suppressed, their litters get up as high as 12 to 16 pups. You can reduce the numbers of coyotes in a given area by 70 percent but the next summer their population will be back to the original number.”

There are already five coyote breeding sites in the Bronx—again, the only part of New York City connected to mainland New York—which was the easy part. What’s ahead is much harder: They’ll have to traverse train tracks, scamper over bridges, and swim rivers and the Long Island Sound to settle new territory and begin breeding. But it’s just a matter of time until one (or more) of them completes the odyssey. “It’s just a numbers game,” Nagy says. “It’s hard enough for one coyote to make it. Then it needs to find a suitable place to set up territory, and then another coyote has to do [the same thing], and that coyote has to be the opposite sex and find its way to the exact same place that that first coyote went to. So it’s tricky, but it will happen. This is the story that’s been played out across the whole continent.”

When it does happen, the scientists will look back at all the data they’ve gathered to see how things change. “As coyotes eventually make their way into Long Island, we’ll see, presumably, some sort of change in the whole community,” Nagy says.

Take, for example, how the coyotes will affect the red fox population. Foxes eat small rodents that harbor Lyme disease; if the coyotes push the smaller foxes out, will there be more rodents and more Lyme disease? “Queens and Long Island give you a pretty good experimental setup in the field,” Nagy says, “where you can measure all sorts of things before coyotes got there and afterwards and in the future and see what changes.”

As the coyotes conquer more and more territory, we’ll have to learn to live alongside them—and educating the public about how to do that falls to Carrero and her colleagues at the Parks Department. “People think they’re dangerous, or that they’re a lot bigger than they are,” Carrero says. “We explain to people that they’re predators, [but] they’re not going to pick a fight they’re not going to win. You explain that they’re maybe 40 pounds at most. You explain that research has been done for stomach content analysis, and most of it is rodents. Once the fear goes away, people usually just want to see one and ask me where they can.”

Some people are surprised when they see a coyote in an urban environment, but others display that very New York attitude: indifference. On a recent call, Carrero supervised the release of a coyote that had been trapped in someone’s backyard. After it was tranquilized and cleared by a vet, Carrero and crew took the coyote to a park for the release, angling the cage toward a wooded area. “With their coloration, they just need to go in 10 yards, and they vanish,” Carrero says. “We pointed him at this beautifully camouflaged forest, and he just went right through a small patch of trees where there was an obvious open area on the other side and ran between the only two groups of people in the park!”

When Carrero went over to see if they had any questions about what had just happened, the people did have one question: Why did she have handcuffs? “That’s the only thing they asked me!” she says, laughing. (Park Rangers are also Special Patrolmen; they’re deputized by the NYPD to make arrests.) “I don’t know if maybe they thought it was a stray dog”—perhaps like she did, all those years ago—“or maybe they’re used to seeing them in the area. But nobody said anything.”

The Gotham Coyote Project has relied on the public’s help to track coyotes. If you think you’ve seen one of these animals, report it here.