Abstract
AbstractElucidating changes in prey behavior in response to a novel predator is key to understanding how individuals acclimate to shifting predation regimes. Such responses are predicted to vary among individuals as a function of the level of risk to which individuals are exposed, temporal changes in risk, and landscape‐mediated changes in perceived risk. We tested how GPS‐tracked moose (Alces alces, n = 19) responded to an emerging risk landscape with the introduction of hunting to a naïve population (large‐scale reduction experiment in Gros Morne National Park, Canada). We predicted that predation risk associated with hunters would influence moose habitat selection: Avoidance responses would be stronger during the day when hunting was allowed, and moose would learn to avoid risky locations which would strengthen in successive years for survivors occupying overall riskier home ranges. We found that moose avoided areas associated with a high risk of encounters with hunters but did not alter selection patterns between day and night. We did not find evidence of moose reacting more strongly to emerging risk as a function of risk within their home range. Moose did not increase their avoidance of areas associated with hunter risk across years but over time survivors selected non‐hunted refuge areas more frequently. Our results suggest that while moose did not adjust fine‐scale habitat selection through time to increased hunting risk, they did adjust selection at broader scales (based on proportions of hunter‐free habitat included in home range relative to study area). This finding supports the hypothesis that habitat selection at larger spatio‐temporal scales may reflect behavioral responses to a population’s most important limiting factors, which may not be apparent at finer scales.
Highlights
Understanding how the costs and benefits of anti-predator behaviors trade off remains enigmatic for most natural populations; the consequences of predation risk to prey space use and subsequently population dynamics and community ecology is increasingly becoming a topic of interest (Laundreet al. 2014, Suraci et al 2016, Gallagher et al 2017)
Defining hunter risk To define the landscape of fear in Gros Morne National Park of Canada (GMNP), we developed resource selection functions (RSFs; Manly et al 2002) based on moose kill location v www.esajournals.org data collected during the three hunting seasons over which data were collected
Our goal was to test if hunting could be implemented as an effective way of altering moose habitat selection patterns to an emerging landscape of risk, and to quantify how individuals responded to this novel risk
Summary
Understanding how the costs and benefits of anti-predator behaviors trade off remains enigmatic for most natural populations; the consequences of predation risk to prey space use and subsequently population dynamics and community ecology is increasingly becoming a topic of interest (Laundreet al. 2014, Suraci et al 2016, Gallagher et al 2017). August 2020 v Volume 11(8) v Article e03216 PERRY ET AL Following this germinal work, the landscape of fear (LOF) has been advanced as a concept to describe the spatial variation in prey perception of predation risk The LOF is typically applied at the population level by evaluating the collective behavioral response of a group to some construct of perceived predation risk (Bleicher 2017). Rarely do applications of the LOF concept account for behavioral plasticity within individuals, for example, risk-avoidance behavior over an environmental gradient such as the availability of risk and refuge habitats on the landscape (Hebblewhite and Merrill 2008) with consequences for a functional response in habitat selection (Mysterud and Ims 1998). The strength of a response to a landscape of fear will likely be dependent on the degree to which habitats used for safety are discrete from habitats used for foraging, with the responses decreasing as foraging and safety habitats intersect
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