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      Who Bites the Bullet First? The Susceptibility of Leopards Panthera pardus to Trophy Hunting

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          Abstract

          Reliable data is fundamentally important for managing large carnivore populations, and vital for informing hunting quota levels if those populations are subject to trophy hunting. Camera-trapping and spoor counts can provide reliable population estimates for many carnivores, but governments typically lack the resources to implement such surveys over the spatial scales required to inform robust quota setting. It may therefore be prudent to shift focus away from estimating population size and instead focus on monitoring population trend. In this paper we assess the susceptibility of African leopards Panthera pardus to trophy hunting. This has management ramifications, particularly if the use of harvest composition is to be explored as a metric of population trend. We explore the susceptibility of different leopard age and sex cohorts to trophy hunting; first by examining their intrinsic susceptibility to encountering trophy hunters using camera-traps as surrogates, and second by assessing their extrinsic susceptibility using photographic questionnaire surveys to determine their attractiveness to hunters. We show that adult male and female leopards share similar incident rates to encountering hunters but adult males are the most susceptible to hunting due to hunter preference for large trophies. In contrast, sub-adult leopards rarely encounter hunters and are the least attractive trophies. We suggest that our findings be used as a foundation for the exploration of a harvest composition scheme in the Kwazulu-Natal and Limpopo provinces where post mortem information is collected from hunted leopards and submitted to the local provincial authorities.

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          Sustainable trophy hunting of African lions.

          In most species, sport hunting of male trophy animals can only reduce overall population size when the rate of removal of males is so high that females can no longer be impregnated. However, where males provide extensive paternal care, the removal of even a few individuals could harm the population as a whole. In species such as lions, excessive trophy hunting could theoretically cause male replacements (and associated infanticide) to become sufficiently common to prevent cubs reaching adulthood. Here we simulate the population consequences of lion trophy hunting using a spatially explicit, individual-based, stochastic model parameterized with 40 years of demographic data from northern Tanzania. Although our simulations confirm that infanticide increases the risk of population extinction, trophy hunting could be sustained simply by hunting males above a minimum age threshold, and this strategy maximizes both the quantity and the quality of the long-term kill. We present a simple non-invasive technique for estimating lion age in populations lacking long-term records, and suggest that quotas would be unnecessary in any male-only trophy species where age determination could be reliably implemented.
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            Conservation: Reproductive collapse in saiga antelope harems.

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              Applicability of Age-Based Hunting Regulations for African Leopards

              In species in which juvenile survival depends strongly on male tenure, excessive trophy hunting can artificially elevate male turnover and increase infanticide, potentially to unsustainable levels. Simulation models show that the likelihood of safe harvests can be improved by restricting offtakes to males old enough to have reared their first cohort of offspring to independence; in the case of African leopards, males were ≥7 years old. Here, we explore the applicability of an age-based approach for regulating trophy hunting of leopards. We conducted a structured survey comprising photographs of known-age leopards to assess the ability of wildlife practitioners to sex and age leopards. We also evaluated the utility of four phenotypic traits for use by trophy hunters to age male leopards in the field. Our logistic regression models showed that male leopard age affected the likelihood of survey respondents identifying the correct sex; notably, males <2 years were typically misidentified as females, while mature males (≥4 years) were sexed correctly. Mature male leopards were also more likely to be aged correctly, as were portrait photographs. Aging proficiency was also influenced by the profession of respondents, with hunters recording the lowest scores. A discriminant model including dewlap size, the condition of the ears, and the extent of facial scarring accurately discriminated among male leopard age classes. Model classification rates were considerably higher than the respective scores attained by survey respondents, implying that the aging ability of hunters could theoretically improve with appropriate training. Dewlap size was a particularly reliable indicator of males ≥7 years and a review of online trophy galleries suggested its wider utility as an aging criterion. Our study demonstrated that an age-based hunting approach is practically applicable for leopards. However, implementation would require major reform within the regulatory framework and the hunting industry.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Academic Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                10 April 2015
                2015
                : 10
                : 4
                : e0123100
                Affiliations
                [1 ]Wildlife Conservation Research Unit, Department of Zoology, University of Oxford, Recanati-Kaplan Centre, Tubney House, Tubney, Oxford, United Kingdom
                [2 ]Panthera, New York, New York, United States of America
                [3 ]Department of Biological Sciences, University of Cape Town, Rondebosch, South Africa
                [4 ]Ruaha Carnivore Project, Iringa, Tanzania
                [5 ]School of Life Sciences, University of Kwazulu-Natal, Durban, South Africa
                Instituto de Higiene e Medicina Tropical, PORTUGAL
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                Conceived and designed the experiments: GAB ARB PJ. Performed the experiments: GAB TD JF ARB. Analyzed the data: ARB JF. Contributed reagents/materials/analysis tools: GAB LH. Wrote the paper: ARB GAB AD JF DWM PJ LH.

                Article
                PONE-D-14-13255
                10.1371/journal.pone.0123100
                4393264
                25860139
                f69bbadd-6060-41ef-b345-1fac6c0cd620
                Copyright @ 2015

                This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited

                History
                : 7 April 2014
                : 27 February 2015
                Page count
                Figures: 1, Tables: 5, Pages: 12
                Funding
                This research was funded by the Panthera Foundation, Albert and Didi Hartog and the Timbo-Stitching Foundation. However the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Custom metadata
                All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.

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