DOI: 10.7291/d1jt30
title: Data from: Puma responses to unreliable human cues suggest an ecological trap in a fragmented landscape

description: Animals’ fear of people is widespread across taxa and can mitigate the
 risk of human-induced mortality, facilitating coexistence in
 human-dominated landscapes. However, humans can be unpredictable predators
 and anthropogenic cues that animals perceive may not be reliable
 indicators of the risk of being killed. In these cases, animal fear
 responses may be ineffective and may even exacerbate the risk of
 anthropogenic mortality. Here, we explore these questions using a 10-year
 dataset of movement and mortality events for the puma (Puma concolor)
 population in the fragmented Santa Cruz Mountains of California, for whom
 the leading cause of death was retaliatory killings by people following
 livestock loss. We modeled retaliatory killing risk and puma habitat
 selection relative to residential housing density to evaluate whether puma
 avoidance of human cues reflected their risk of being killed. We
 documented a mismatch between human cues, fear responses, and actual risk.
 Rather than scaling directly with housing density, retaliatory killings
 occurred at intermediate levels of human development and at night. Pumas
 avoided these areas during the day but selected for these high-risk areas
 at night, resulting in a mismatch between cue and risk impacting 17% of
 the study area. These results are unlikely to be driven by puma hunting
 behavior: livestock constitute a very small proportion of puma diets, and
 we found no evidence for the alternative hypothesis that state-dependent
 foraging drove depredation of livestock and subsequent retaliatory
 killings. Our findings indicate that puma responses to human cues are not
 sufficient to enable human-carnivore coexistence in this area and suggest
 that reducing risk from humans in places with few perceptible human cues
 would facilitate carnivore conservation in human-dominated landscapes.
 Furthermore, a mismatch between human cues and responses by carnivores can
 lead to selection rather than avoidance of risky areas, which could result
 in an ecological trap.
description: We captured adult and subadult pumas from 2009-2019 and fit pumas
 with GPS collars set to record a GPS location every 4 hours. For animals
 that died during the study, we recorded date, location, and cause of
 death. We 1) modeled overall and cause-specific mortality rates using the
 Kaplan-Meier procedure and non-parametric cumulative incidence functions,
 2) modeled habitat selection using step selection functions, 3) modeled
 spatial predictors of the distribution of sites where retaliatory killings
 occurred, and 4) compared time since last predicted deer kill and body
 weights between animals killed after depredating livestock and the overall
 puma population. Included in this data product are the time-to-event data
 (tte_cause.csv) for analysis 1, covariate information for 4-hour puma
 locations (ssf_data.csv) for analysis 2, covariate information for
 locations of retaliatory killings (rk_rsf_data.csv) and other sources of
 mortality (other_mort_rsf_data.csv) for analysis 3, body weight data
 (body_weight_data.csv) and kill rate data (times_since_last_kill.csv and
 kill_rates.csv) for analysis 4. Please see Nisi AC,
 Benson JF, Wilmers CC. 2022. Puma responses to unreliable human cues
 suggest an ecological trap in a fragmented landscape. Oikos:
 10.1111/oik.09051 for a full description of data collection methods, and
 the README file for detailed descriptions of each dataset.