Date of Award
12-1-2024
Degree Name
Master of Science
Department
Zoology
First Advisor
Bastille-Rousseau, Guillaume
Abstract
Mesocarnivores, including bobcats (Lynx rufus) and coyotes (Canis latrans), serve an important ecological role, functioning as the top predators throughout much of the eastern United States due to the extirpation of larger-bodied carnivores. Mesocarnivores are often described as generalists due to their flexibility in forage and habitat preferences and their ability to persist in human-dominated landscapes. However, this characterization overlooks the fact that many individuals within these populations act as specialists, with movement, space use, and predation strategies varying between individuals and across environmental contexts. Quantifying variability in mesocarnivore space use and movement from multiple perspectives can provide a better understanding of their ecological function as the current top predators and their potential influence on white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) populations. To better understand how bobcats and coyotes spatially respond to fawn kill sites, I leveraged two types of habitat selection functions (Resource Selection Functions and Latent Selection Difference Functions) to create a framework describing how bobcats/coyotes and female white-tailed deer respond to fawn kill sites and how these relationships vary with landscape heterogeneity. In certain landscape attributes, does decreased their use of habitats which were associated with an increased risk of fawn predation. Additionally, predators were more efficient at killing fawns in certain areas rather than increasing their selection for areas associated with increased fawn risk. To evaluate how space use strategies varied across individuals and environmental contexts, I also quantified individual- and population-level variation in speed and resource specialization from coyotes located across three disparate environments (forest, agriculture, and urban) in Illinois. After accounting for the influence of various external and internal factors, movement and space use behaviors varied substantially among coyotes within and across populations. Given that the integration of movement ecology and animal personality is relatively new, my work served as a key first step in determining that behavioral patterns for movement and habitat selection at one scale (within a population) do not necessarily hold across broader spatial scales (across populations). Overall, I found that evaluating risk and space use from multiple perspectives can provide a deeper understanding of the predator-prey spatial game and mesocarnivore space use.
Access
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