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Abstract
Climate change and human population growth have increased anthropogenic threats to biodiversity and habitat fragmentation. Ecologists and conservationists need tools to assess the effect of these ecological and environmental perturbations on organismal fitness. One possibility is glucocorticoids (e.g. cortisol and corticosterone) which integrate various factors such as anthropogenic disturbances, predation, food or environmental stressors. Here we tested the hypothesis that fecal glucocorticoid metabolite concentrations (GCMs) in wild female elk Cervus canadensis increased as the hunting season progressed. We also examined the influence of year, food availability and elk group size on fecal GCMs. We found that as the hunting season progressed, fecal GCMs tended to decrease. We also found that as the number of cows in a group increased, GCMs decreased and found a strong effect of year on fecal GCMs, with samples collected in 2016 having lower fecal GCMs than those collected in 2015, 2017 and 2018. However, yearly variation was not driven by availability of hard mast forage. The association between hunting pressure and fecal GCMs and identifying what is driving yearly variation in fecal GCMs warrants further study. We highlight the negative influence of group size, possibly due to vigilance, on fecal GCMs and the importance of examining ecologically relevant covariates to accurately identify main treatment effects.
Highlights
Hunting has long been engrained in many societies, with roles that range from cultural aspects to sustenance provisioning, and more recently, management of wildlife
The model with the most support indicated that days of hunting, group size and year influenced fecal glucocorticoid metabolites (GCMs) of adult female elk (AICc Weight: 0.81, Table 1)
While previous studies have found no effect of predation on fecal GCMs in ungulates, our results extend this finding to an ungulate species that experienced anthropogenic hunting pressure
Summary
Hunting has long been engrained in many societies, with roles that range from cultural aspects to sustenance provisioning, and more recently, management of wildlife. Evidence of the direct demographic impacts of hunting on wildlife is prevalent (Anderson and Burnham 1976, Topp-Jørgensen et al 2009, Creel et al 2011), theoretical advances in the ecology of fear (Brown et al 1999, Laundré et al 2010) highlight indirect impacts of hunting, such as changes in behavior and physiology (Bateson and Bradshaw 1997) These changes can affect various traits including antipredator behavior, immune function and reproduction (McEwen and Wingfield 2003, Romero et al 2009), subsequently reducing population growth, in con-. While forage availability can vary between years, driving annual variation in glucocorticoids, so too can other environmental and ecological factors such as weather (Buck et al 2007) and predator abundance (Boonstra et al 1998) As such, measuring these potentially confounding variables increases the accuracy of measuring glucocorticoids as an indicator of anthropogenic impacts (e.g. hunting). We predicted that hunting pressure (as measured by number of elk harvested and day of harvest) would increase fecal GCMs levels, and that fecal GCMs would have a negative relationship with food availability and group size
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