Search

Restricting movements to familiar areas should increase individual fitness as it provides animals with information about the spatial distribution of resources and predation risk. While the benefits of familiarity for locating resources have been reported previously, the potential value of familiarity for predation avoidance has been accorded less attention. It has been suggested that familiarity should be beneficial for anti‐predator behaviour when direct cues of predation risk are unclear and do not allow prey to identify well‐defined spatial refuges. However, to our knowledge, this hypothesis has yet to be tested.Here, we assessed how site familiarity, measured as the intensity of use of a given location, is associated with the probability of roe deer Capreolus capreolus being killed by two predators with contrasting hunting tactics, the Eurasian lynx Lynx lynx and human hunters. While risk of human hunting was confined to open habitats, risk of lynx predation was more diffuse, with no clear refuge areas.We estimated cause‐specific mortality rates in a competing risk framework for 212 GPS‐collared roe deer in two ecologically distinct areas of Central Europe to test the hypothesis that the daily risk of being killed by lynx or hunters should be lower in areas of high familiarity.We found strong evidence that site familiarity reduces the risk of being predated by lynx, whereas the evidence that the risk of being hunted is linked to site familiarity was weak.We suggest that local knowledge about small‐scale differences in predation risk and information about efficient escape routes affect an individual's ability to avoid or escape an attack by an ambush predator. Our study emphasizes the role of site familiarity in determining the susceptibility of prey to predation. Further research will be required to understand better how a cognitive map of individual spatial information is beneficial for avoiding predation in the arms race that drives the predator–prey shell game. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Humans, as super predators, can have strong effects on wildlife behaviour, including profound modifications of diel activity patterns. Subsequent to the return of large carnivores to human‐modified ecosystems, many prey species have adjusted their spatial behaviour to the contrasting landscapes of fear generated by both their natural predators and anthropogenic pressures. The effects of predation risk on temporal shifts in diel activity of prey, however, remain largely unexplored in human‐dominated landscapes.We investigated the influence of the density of lynx Lynx lynx, a nocturnal predator, on the diel activity patterns of their main prey, the roe deer Capreolus capreolus, across a gradient of human disturbance and hunting at the European scale.Based on 11 million activity records from 431 individually GPS‐monitored roe deer in 12 populations within the EURODEER network (http://eurodeer.org), we investigated how lynx predation risk in combination with both lethal and non‐lethal human activities affected the diurnality of deer.We demonstrated marked plasticity in roe deer diel activity patterns in response to spatio‐temporal variations in risk, mostly due to human activities. In particular, roe deer decreased their level of diurnality by a factor of 1.37 when the background level of general human disturbance was high. Hunting exacerbated this effect, as during the hunting season deer switched most of their activity to night‐time and, to a lesser extent, to dawn, although this pattern varied noticeably in relation to lynx density. Indeed, in the presence of lynx, their main natural predator, roe deer were relatively more diurnal. Overall, our results revealed a strong influence of human activities and the presence of lynx on diel shifts in roe deer activity.In the context of the recovery of large carnivores across Europe, we provide important insights about the effects of predators on the behavioural responses of their prey in human‐dominated ecosystems. Modifications in the temporal partitioning of ungulate activity as a response to human activities may facilitate human–wildlife coexistence, but likely also have knock‐on effects for predator–prey interactions, with cascading effects on ecosystem functioning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]