Western Washington is home to an abundance of urban wildlife, animals that live and somehow thrive at the intersection of forests and concrete. Coyotes are the poster children of urban wildlife, scrappy scavengers who feed off a city’s critters, refuse and pets.
Most cities across America coexist with coyotes, whether they know it or not, and the Seattle-Tacoma area is no exception. A new study by a team of University of Washington researchers, led by a postdoctoral scholar named Yasmine Hentati, recently has revealed that over one-third of the coyotes studied across Western Washington carry a deadly tapeworm that can be transmitted to pets and, in some cases, to humans.
Deadly worms
The disease-causing tapeworm is called Echinococcus multilocularis, and Hentati and her team weren’t originally looking for it. But they found it.
“I knew it had been spreading across America,” Hentati told The News Tribune. “Including Alberta and British Columbia. But I didn’t expect to find it here.“…