Department of Environmental Science and Technology, University of Maryland, College Park, MD.
Agriculture Research Service, Invasive Insect Biocontrol and Behavior Laboratory, Office of National Programs, United States Department of Agriculture, Beltsville, MD.
J Insect Sci. 2020 Nov 1;20(6). doi: 10.1093/jisesa/ieaa044.
Live capture of white-tailed deer (Odocoileus virginianus) (Zimmermann, 1780) is often necessary for research, population control, disease monitoring, and parasite surveillance. We provide our deer trapping protocol used in a tick-host vector ecology research project and recommendations to improve efficiency of deer trapping programs using drop nets in suburban areas. We captured 125 deer across two trapping seasons. Generally, lower daily minimum temperatures were related to increased capture probability, along with the presence of snow. Our most successful trapping sites were less forested, contained more fragmentation, and greater proportion of human development (buildings, roads, recreational fields). To improve future suburban deer trapping success, trapping efforts should include areas dominated by recreational fields and should not emphasize remote, heavily forested, less fragmented parks. Concurrently, our study illustrated the heterogeneous nature of tick distributions, and we collected most ticks from one trapping site with moderate parameter values between the extremes of the most developed and least developed trapping sites. This emphasized the need to distribute trapping sites to not only increase your capture success but to also trap in areas across varying levels of urbanization and fragmentation to increase the probability of parasite collection.
活捕获白尾鹿（Odocoileus virginianus）（齐默尔曼，1780）通常是研究、种群控制、疾病监测和寄生虫监测所必需的。我们提供了在蜱宿主向量生态学研究项目中使用的捕鹿方案，并提出了使用落网在郊区提高捕鹿计划效率的建议。我们在两个捕鹿季节共捕获了 125 只鹿。一般来说，较低的日最低温度与增加捕获概率有关，同时还有雪的存在。我们最成功的捕鹿地点的森林覆盖率较低，破碎化程度较高，人类开发程度（建筑物、道路、娱乐场地）较大。为了提高未来郊区捕鹿的成功率，捕鹿工作应包括以娱乐场地为主的区域，而不应强调偏远、森林茂密、破碎化程度低的公园。同时，我们的研究说明了蜱虫分布的不均匀性，我们从一个捕鹿地点采集了大部分蜱虫，该地点的参数值在最发达和最不发达的捕鹿地点之间处于中等水平。这强调了需要分布捕鹿地点，不仅要提高捕获成功率，还要在不同城市化和破碎化程度的区域进行捕鹿，以增加寄生虫采集的可能性。
