Fear, Human Shields And The Redistribution Of Prey And Predators In Protected Areas

Complexity Digest 2007.40 - 11.01

20-Oct-2007

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Fear, Human Shields And The Redistribution Of Prey And Predators In Protected Areas, Biol. Lett.

Excerpts: Protected areas form crucial baselines to judge ecological change, yet areas (...) are under intense economic and political pressures to accommodate massive human visitation and attendant infrastructure. An unintended consequence is the strong modulation of the three-way interaction involving people, predators and prey, a dynamic that questions the extent to which animal distributions and interactions are independent of subtle human influences. Here, I capitalize on the remarkable 9-day synchronicity in which 90% of moose neonates in the Yellowstone Ecosystem are born, to demonstrate a substantive change in how prey avoid predators; birth sites shift away from traffic-averse brown bears and towards paved roads. (...)

Source: Fear, Human Shields And The Redistribution Of Prey And Predators In Protected Areas
[ http://www.journals.royalsoc.ac.uk/content/v66128810213g5l2/?p=b5b836d7d1ba4e27afad072269a116bd&pi=3 ], J. Berger, DOI: 10.1098/rsbl.2007.0415, Biological Letters, 2007/10/09
Contributed by Atin Das - dasatinyahoo.co.in