Big Cat Mortality in Subsistence Hunts in Amazonia

Abstract

We estimate the annual mortality of big cats ( Panthera onca and Puma concolor ) resulting from subsistence hunts in two Amazonian Extractive Reserves. Leveraging data from a participatory biodiversity monitoring program, which records the outcomes of hunting forays, we treat the set of all hunts carried out in a given year, k , as an ensemble of Bernoulli experiments where each hunt may or may not result in a big cat killing with probability p . From this premise, we built a Bayesian model to estimate the number of cats killed as a binomial random variable with parameters k and p . We estimate that 48 (95% CI: 18–92) big cats are killed annually in the study area, which is consistent with an independent estimate for the same area and within the same magnitude as estimates for other Amazonian sites. Our findings underscore the contribution of subsistence hunting to big cat mortality. 我们评估了亚马孙雨林地区两个采掘保护区中, 因生计狩猎导致的大型猫科动物 (美洲豹和美洲狮) 的年死亡率。利用一个记录狩猎活动结果的参与式生物多样性监测项目的数据, 我们将给定年份 k 中进行的所有狩猎活动视为一系列伯努利实验, 其中每次狩猎都有可能或者不可能导致大型猫科动物被猎杀, 其概率为 p 。基于这一前提, 我们构建了一个贝叶斯模型, 将被杀死的猫科动物数量估计为一个具有参数为 k 和 p 的二项随机变量。我们估计该研究区域每年有48只 (95% 置信区间:18‐92) 大型猫科动物被杀死, 这一数据与同一区域的独立估计值相符, 且与亚马孙其他地区的估计值处于同一数量级。我们的研究结果突显了生计狩猎对大型猫科动物死亡率的影响。