Megazord Camera Trap Study Finds That Carnivores Like to Eat

Asia Murphy
Jul 10, 2017 · 3 min read
The gorgeous lead figure for the new Global Ecology and Biogeography article on global patterns in carnivore presence.

Trail cameras are perhaps the coolest wildlife research tech used today. Those teeny GPS backpacks that send you locations of a tagged bat or bird or turtle directly to your computer get pretty close.

Yes. Pretty close.

But c’mon. In addition to getting candid snapshots of crazy-cool things like a puma and her babies…

or a fosa peeing…

or yellow-throated martens rubbing on each other…

trail camera data helps wildlife scientists answer questions like:

— what species are present in a protected area?

— how many animals are in a forest patch?

— what time are animals active?

— are there more species in logged versus unlogged forest?

Enter a newly published study on patterns in carnivore populations in different countries. My friend Lindsey Rich and her collaborators took the data from 13 surveys in 12 countries — from Norway to Argentina to Madagascar and Iran — to look at how carnivores are doing globally.

Despite looking at a number of factors like forest cover, protected area status, and distance to the nearest major road, what they found most often was that where there is a high activity of prey species, there are carnivores.

Green means that there was higher carnivore presence at camera locations with higher rates of prey detected by camera.

This result makes sense. It takes a lot of deer or small mammals to feed a healthy population of puma or fosa. But there were some results that raised question marks. For example:

Only Norway and Canada had higher carnivore presence in protected areas versus unprotected.

You would expect more green here, right? Isn’t a fully protected national park better than an unprotected patch of forest?

As the authors state in the paper, just because something is designated as protected doesn’t mean that it actually is protected. There are many protected areas where carnivores and their prey are still being hunted or forest is being cut down.

Or perhaps the protected status came too late, and most of the carnivores were hunted out pre-protection.

This was an awesome use of trail camera data, but the authors call for more studies. What would we find if we had more trail camera surveys in other countries? Would we learn more about what is important for carnivores if there was more detailed, fine-scale data on things like the small logging roads and streams (as opposed to the main roads and lakes that the authors were forced to settle with)? This paper has been kind enough to start getting at the global patterns in wildlife populations that might help us save a number of elusive and mysterious species.


Asia Murphy

Written by

Studying wildlife in PA & Madagascar with trail cams. twitter: @am_anatiala.

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