Meeting Abstract
Climate change and a growing human population have increased anthropogenic threats to biodiversity and habitat fragmentation. Ecologists and conservationists have focused on how to assess the effect of these ecological and environmental perturbations on organismal fitness. Glucocorticoids (e.g. cortisol and corticosterone, CORT) are commonly used to assess animal welfare as they integrate various factors such as anthropogenic disturbances, predation, food, or environmental stressors. Here we tested the hypothesis that anthropogenic hunting pressure increases fecal CORT metabolites (fecal GCM) in wild female elk (Cervus elaphus) and examined the influence of herd size, year, and food availability on fecal GCM. We found a trend for decreased fecal GCM with as the hunting season progressed. We also found a negative relationship between fecal GCM and number of cows in the herd, and a strong effect of year on fecal GCM, with samples collected in 2016 having lower CORT than those collected in 2015, 2017, and 2018. However, yearly variation was not driven by availability of hard mast forage. The potential negative association between hunting pressure and CORT and identifying what is driving yearly variation in CORT warrants further study. We highlight the influence of herd size, possibly due to vigilance, on fecal GCM and the importance of examining ecologically relevant covariates to accurately identify main treatment effects, such as hunting pressure.
