Rutherford Kate L, St Clair Colleen Cassady, Visscher Darcy R
Department of Biological Sciences University of Alberta Edmonton Alberta Canada.
Department of Biology King's University Edmonton Alberta Canada.
Ecol Evol. 2025 Jul 10;15(7):e71752. doi: 10.1002/ece3.71752. eCollection 2025 Jul.
Deterrents that are designed to emulate humans or natural predators are increasingly applied to manage the behaviors and distribution of conflict-prone species, but the efficacy of these tools is frequently challenged by the process of habituation. In this study, we investigated the responses of Roosevelt elk () and black-tailed deer () to playbacks of unimodal (acoustic) and multimodal (acoustic and visual) stimuli on crop fields in the Cowichan Valley, British Columbia, Canada. We contrasted behavioral responses to acoustic recordings of (i) human voices (shouting and talking), (ii) natural predator vocalizations (wolf and cougar), (iii) dog barks, and (iv) local bird vocalizations (control) and tested the effect of flashing LED lights using alternating audio-light and audio-only treatments at the same sites over two 3-week periods. We found that multimodal stimuli increased the likelihood of fleeing by 4.7 in elk and 1.8 in deer but did not affect the time spent in alert postures. Among acoustic treatments, playbacks of human shouts tended to elicit greater flight responses than humans talking, natural predators, dogs, and bird sounds. Both species showed evidence of habituation to the deterrents as the 6-week experiment progressed, but elk responses declined more rapidly than deer, and rates of habituation for both species were slower when deterrents included flashing lights. For deer, alert responses declined more rapidly at sites surrounded by more houses and closer to highways. Together, our results indicate that recordings of humans shouting provided the most salient acoustic deterrent for these ungulates and that acoustic deterrents were enhanced with lights, but habituation to our stationary deterrents occurred rapidly, especially in proximity to human activity.
旨在模仿人类或自然捕食者的威慑手段越来越多地被用于管理易发生冲突物种的行为和分布，但这些工具的有效性常常受到习惯化过程的挑战。在本研究中，我们调查了罗斯福马鹿（）和黑尾鹿（）对加拿大不列颠哥伦比亚省考伊琴谷农田上单峰（声学）和多峰（声学和视觉）刺激回放的反应。我们对比了对以下声音记录的行为反应：（i）人类声音（呼喊和交谈）、（ii）自然捕食者叫声（狼和美洲狮）、（iii）狗叫声，以及（iv）当地鸟类叫声（对照），并在同一地点分两个为期3周的时间段，通过交替进行音频-灯光和仅音频处理，测试了闪烁LED灯的效果。我们发现，多峰刺激使马鹿逃跑的可能性增加了4.7倍，使鹿增加了1.8倍，但并未影响保持警戒姿势的时间。在声学处理中，人类呼喊的回放往往比人类交谈、自然捕食者、狗和鸟类声音引发更大的逃跑反应。随着为期6周的实验推进，两个物种都表现出对威慑手段习惯化的迹象，但马鹿的反应比鹿下降得更快，并且当威慑手段包括闪烁灯光时，两个物种的习惯化速度都较慢。对于鹿来说，在房屋较多且靠近高速公路的地点，警戒反应下降得更快。总体而言，我们的结果表明，人类呼喊的录音为这些有蹄类动物提供了最显著的声学威慑，并且声学威慑通过灯光得到增强，但对我们的固定威慑手段的习惯化迅速发生，尤其是在靠近人类活动的地方。
