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.

Keywords

monitoring / Panthera onca / Puma concolor / subsistence hunting

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