![]() Miller : There is a pretty fascinating video on the university website announcing this research, it’s sort of a time lapse video of a bobcat getting collared. Typically, the only reason why a collar would be still for that long is if the animal is dead.Īnd so once we’d get a mortality signal, we’d go to the site as fast as we could and do a mortality investigation to figure out why and how the animal died. And then if the collar is still for six to eight hours, the collar will transmit a mortality signal. We put GPS collars on them that record their locations every four hours. We captured the animals using a variety of techniques that were approved by our animal care committees at the university. Prugh: Well, it relied primarily on putting radio collars on all of these species. Miller : Can you describe how you set up this research? Prugh: Yeah, I don’t think there was anything particularly unique about these study areas. Miller : So even though this is Northern Washington, what you’ve just described would actually be a pretty good description for huge swaths of Oregon as well, and big parts of the rest of Washington. Both study areas were fairly typical of what you find in rural western areas where there is a mix of private land that included ranch land, farm land, small towns, and private timber land, as well as a lot of forest service land and tribal land as well. Miller : Can you just give us a sense for the mixture of lands, what they were used for, what they were like? All four of these carnivores were subject to human caused mortality in both of our study areas. Prugh: We had two study areas in Northern Washington, but there were no protected areas in either one, meaning no national parks or areas where hunting activities were restricted. Miller : So for this new study, you focused on different kinds of lands? How humans would affect these dynamics is really not well known at all. But one key thing to note is that most of these studies that have looked at interactions among carnivores within the community have happened in protected areas like national parks where there’s either no or very little human hunting of these animals. So there’s prior evidence to suggest that the relationship could kind of go either way. But on the other hand, the smaller carnivores often scavenge from large carnivore kills. Prugh: Well, there have been quite a few studies that have shown that larger carnivores will sometimes kill smaller carnivores. Miller : How much did researchers already know about what happens, or what were your suppositions for the effects that the largest predators have? What happens with these critters can really have a big effect on the whole ecosystem. These midsize carnivores that we refer to as mesopredators are really important in food webs because they tend to have really diverse diets. Prugh: Well, the main goal is to find out how large carnivores like wolves and cougars affect smaller ones like coyotes and bobcats. Miller : What exactly did you set out to learn with this new study? Laura Prugh: Thank you, it’s great to be here. Laura Prugh is an associate professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Washington, and the lead author of this study. But then, their strategy backfires as humans end up killing them. They get out of the way of apex predators by going into areas more dominated by humans. As wolves continue to reintroduce themselves onto western lands, scientists at the University of Washington had a big question: what will this mean for predators that are lower on the food chain? Basically, if wolves, or cougars for that matter, move into an area, how do bobcats and coyotes respond? It turns out, according to research published recently in the journal science, these smaller predators skedaddle. The following transcript was created by a computer and edited by a volunteer:ĭave Miller : This is Think Out Loud on OPB. Laura Prugh is an associate professor of wildlife ecology at the University of Washington and the lead author of this study which was published last month in the journal, “Science.” She joins us to talk about the research findings and what they say about the so-called “human shield effect” on predator-prey relationships observed in Yellowstone and other national parks. But the strategy ultimately proved lethal, as the bobcats and coyotes were three to four times more likely to be killed by people than by those apex predators. The animals moved from areas uninhabited by humans into rural communities to escape being killed by wolves and cougars with whom they compete for food. Scientists at the University of Washington placed GPS collars on dozens of bobcats and coyotes and tracked their movements and behaviors in Northeast and Central Washington.
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