'Coyotes' the moviie trailer - Sep 9

 Obligatory disclaimer: real life sucks, but then I watched the trailer for the upcoming 2025 ‘Coyotes’ movie and realize that Hollywood can suck even worse. Let us discuss.

First, why wolves are known to be man-eaters (in the past, however distant), and coyotes are not? Frankly because they do not have the strength. A grey wolf (not to be confused with several other canine/lupine species) and a coyote look superficially similar, but the wolf is much more formidable.

A coyote – on average – is about 1 m in length, (without the tail) and weighs about 16 kg. A grey wolf, on the other hand, is about 1.5 m in length (also without the tail) and weighs about 60 kg. Most of this weight comes from muscle, and a wolf’s skull and jaws are wider and stronger than those of the coyote are; a coyote is more of a precise strike carnivore, and a grey wolf aims for greater mass damage instead.

Again, how do carnivorous mammals kill? In general, (there are always exceptions), they either go for a precise strike (on the throat, more rarely on the muzzle or even the skull), or, conversely, they bite and tear – tear off pieces of flesh, live… You need physical strength in both of these scenarios, of course, but the second one requires a much stronger bite, and a much stronger (and durable) body to handle such rough hunting. Lions, spotted hyenas, and grey wolves have it, and they all hunt big prey – African buffalo, antelopes, and deer (including the elk and sometimes the moose), in case of the wolves.

By contrast, the jackal and the red fox, the coyote and the striped & brown hyena do not normally hunt big animals; they prefer to scavenge, or to eat smaller prey, such as rodents, rabbits, and hares. The hyenas, true, have a more powerful bite than their canine counterparts do, but they are still at half the size of the spotted hyena, and in general defer to it, when they encounter it.

The ancestor of the more successful spotted hyena drove the ancestors of the striped and brown hyenas into the African deserts, and sort of forced the ancestor of the aardwolf to become an obligate insectivore – but we digress.

…Only not, for in North America the relationship between grey wolves and coyotes isn’t unlike that of… lions and spotted hyenas, for example, only more one-sided: the wolves’ tower over their coyote cousins, they are much stronger and heavier than the coyotes are, and they hunt in large packs, while coyotes hunt in pairs or alone. There is footage – from the Yellowstone Park – of wolves killing coyotes in packs. One on one, a wolf might let a coyote be; a wolf pack will make short work of it.

Enter humans. They drove the grey wolf to extinction in the North American East, and in the West its’ population is still reduced. The coyote adapted and flourished alongside humans, (as did the raccoon and the red fox)… but there were no cases of attacks on humans by any of them, (unless rabies or a similar factor was involved). The coyote may look like a wolf, generally, but unlike the wolf, it is not mentally wired to tackle prey as big as an adult human being… Enter the coydog.

It is exactly what it sounds like – it is a hybrid of a domestic dog, (either intentionally or a feral animal), and a coyote. Just like its’ bigger cousin the wolfdog, this hybrid seems to be quite fertile, (but then again, the question if the domestic dog an independent species, a subspecies of the grey wolf, or just a domesticated wolf with artificially derived physical differences is still open), and is doing well enough in North America.

The American coyote is not known to be a man-eater. The Australian dingo, (again, either a domestic dog turned wild, a separate species, a subspecies, or something else entirely), is. In addition, unlike the coyote it hunts in packs, as the grey wolf – or the feral populations of the domestic dog – do. More succinctly, the dingo is not as big as the grey wolf is, but it can be dangerous to people, and sometimes, it is.

Now, in North America, we get cases of domestic dogs interbreeding with grey wolves and especially coyotes – and unlike them, domestic dogs are not afraid of humans. Oh, they are peoples’ best friends, but with a metaphorical switch, they can be their worst enemies instead. When they attack, the results are bad and often deadly for the humans. You put in coyote, let alone grey wolf DNA into the mix, and the result is worse – but where does it leave the upcoming ‘Coyotes’ movie?

‘Coyotes’ apparently aims to be a social satire or something else, not unlike how ‘The Death of a Unicorn’ was. (Remember that sad pile of horse apples?) Fair enough, and the script is intentionally screwy and unrealistic – but the poor coyotes. Moreover, my point is that if they renamed the film ‘Coydogs’, and had not purebred coyotes, but coyote-feral dog crossbreeds, it would have worked just as well, and been more accurate, so there is that. The movie cast and crew decided that that would be too much effort, so we will probably end up with some anti-coyote hysteria, something that we do not really need right now – but it is real life. It sucks.

This is it for now – see you all soon!

"Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives" movie review

A small, but stable branch of Animal Planet is creating monster quasi-documentary films. There was “Dragons: Fantasy Made Real”, “Mermaids: The Body on the Beach” and “Mermaids: The New Evidence”, and now “Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives” – and it is this movie that I am going to rant about. Let us begin.

What is so special about megalodon? In the previous films AP can shoehorn mythical creatures, dragons and mermaids, into real life while doing it realistically. Seriously, a dragon or a mermaid in a sci-fi/fantasy show is expected, it belongs there – in a documentary show not so much. AP had to come up with some really fancy explanations how dragons and mermaids really worked and where they come from...with a mixed success, in my opinion (do not get me started on the mermaid/aquatic ape theory). 

Megalodon is another story. It already is a real-life creature (albeit one that is supposed to have died out during the Ice Age) – a shark, that may be 15 m in length on the average, but nothing more. People have encountered and studied sharks for a while now, and outside of its length megalodon does not appear to be very different: extreme in its size, but nothing else.

But...

Ever since humans have encountered sharks they feared them. The sharks are some of the biggest predators in the oceans and unlike their terrestrial counterparts – lions, tigers, hyenas, etc – they cannot be controlled. Nowadays it is relatively easy to track down a lion or a tiger if they become man-eaters; a shark – not so much.

Shark attacks are also random: lions and tigers tend to treat humans as a steady and regular source of food once they start eating them – sharks do not. To a shark a human has considerably less blubber and more bone (sharks do not really eat marrow) than a seal or a sea lion of a matching size does. That is why they tend to leave us alone...after they bit off an arm or a leg or a chunk of torso – not that that is any consolation to a shark attack victim, you know? Sometimes one bite is enough to kill you, if the shark is big enough or the bitten place is vital enough in its anatomy.

Sharks are also highly mobile and thus unpredictable. A great white or a tiger shark can travel – in fact, it almost constantly travels across the world for different places to get a meal: one week it is in South Africa, the next – at Mexico or Hawaii: why not? It is humans who are aliens in the underwater world of fish and other creatures of the depths, and the sharks are perhaps some of Mother Nature’s most formidable reminders that that is so, alongside giant octopi and squids. Naturally humans fear them – megalodon is just the uttermost manifestation of those fears inflated to an extreme size – big enough to sink a boat in one bit and swallow a human in another.

How realistic are those fears? Firstly, people want to believe that sharks are giant carnivorous monsters that just want to eat people attacking them from below (as in “Jaws”) or from above (“Sharknado”). There is probably nothing that can change this picture so the idea of the monster-movie megalodon is going to persevere for decades to come.

Secondly, cryptozoologists want to believe that megalodon exists. Basically, this is the same point as the one above, save that fear has been replaced by awe. They are going to seek out proof that megalodon exists no matter what. So far official science says that no, it does not, but when ever did this stop people? Ergo no, I do not think that the hype around sharks in general and megalodon in particular will ever go away.

As for the movie itself... the name “megalodon” was used mostly as a brand: people know this name and associate it with a giant shark, so AP just appropriated it for their newest monster. They showed it quite realistically too, save for the fact that in real life megalodon (well, Carcharodon megalodon, if you want to get technical) was not a deep-sea fish: the depths of oceans and seas are cold, have little food and not much more oxygen – hardly a place for a warmth-loving whale-eating shark!

Furthermore, megaldon did not start out as a whale-eating giant: the first years of its life were probably spent in shallower coastal waters (BBC Sea Monsters) hunting smaller prey – dugongs and manatees, dolphins, sea turtles, maybe even large fish - and avoid the adult megalodon which would probably eat the youngsters instead (as modern sharks tend to do). This would have brought them into contact – and conflict – with humans much sooner than “just now” and I do not know who would have won...

Then we have the humpback whales – that was probably the most annoying part of the movie. Why humpback whales? There are 15 species of modern baleen whales (you know, the ones that feed on plankton as the humpback whales do), plus the sperm whale (that has teeth rather than baleen), all of which can be food for megalodon if it existed in modern day and age. 

Why the humpback? Sharks do not have the sort of food specialization that the carnivorous mammals, birds and reptiles may have. Great white shark prefers to eat sea lions and fur seals, but it will probably try anything to see just how edible it is. The bull and the tiger sharks eat anything, including garbage that ended up in the sea; so does the blue shark but it is a fish of the open ocean and encounters people less often than the great white, bull and tiger.

And so probably had megalodon – it was willing to eat anything if it was big and meaty enough. If it lived in modern times, the humpback whale would have had no preference: megalodon would have eaten it just as willingly as it would have eaten the blue and pygmy right whales, for example.

The closest I can come up with for the reason behind the humpback whale is that it is one of the more popular and well-known species of whales among people (at least for now): its footage is easily obtainable, the audience would just look at the humpback knowingly and return back to concentrating on the shark. Fair enough.

As for megalodon's coloration – dark above, light below – I believe that it is called cryptic countershading and many of ocean-dwelling animals have it. The fish have it: not just the sharks, but also jacks, mackerel, tuna, etc; the penguins have it as well, especially smaller species like the African penguin: it helps them blend in with the waters around them. (Terrestrial animals often have lighter bellies than backs as well, but for slightly different reasons.) This does not make megalodon some sort of an unstoppable super ocean monster, but-

“Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives” was released as part of Discovery Channel’s 2013 Shark Week, when the Discovery channel does its best to cash in on the shark hype that was discussed before. And it seems that 2013”s version is going to be the most commercial Shark Week yet, as Discovery Channel is actually airing “Jaws” and “Sharknado”, regardless of the fact that they are fiction. They are about sharks, they are popular with the TV audiences, so Discovery Channel is airing them.

And “Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives” is just a manifestation of the same hype. People wanted to see it because it was a movie about a monster shark that lives in the ocean’s depths – a giant bogeyman rather than a real-life monster, a creature no more real than the mermaid is. If that is what they expected they got it; if they did not – they probably turned it off and watched a megalodon-related documentary on YouTube or elsewhere. Still, as a movie “Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives” was a decent one, without any particular political hype, unlike the mermaid duology, even if it was also taking place in South Africa – but I’m guessing that someone in AP management has a very complicated or weird relationship with South Africa and just cannot let it go. Oh well.

The final bit of weirdness was the movie script. “Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives” did its best to cash in on the hype and fear that surrounds sharks, especially the mythical giants. The fact that it did not end with Collin Drake and his crew duking it out with Meg in a Captain Ahab-Moby Dick style a la “Jaws” was a good thing in my opinion but in the first parts of the movie it certainly sounded like it was going to end thus. I am guessing that someone remembered that Animal Planet is for nature conservation, not destruction, and changes had to be made...just not very thoroughly.

In any case, I believe that I am rating “Megalodon: Monster Shark Lives” three and a half stars out of five; well, maybe three and three quarters. It was not the best megalodon-related movie that was ever made, especially a documentary one, but it was not the worst either.

Peace out!