Human activities affect the eating behavior of large predators

predators, such as jaguars, may have fled after hearing the evening news.
photo Source: NPS Photo/Alamy
"Talk Show" asked you to postpone dinner? A jaguar living in California may be considerate. In one experiment, the animals gave up their predation after hearing the host's voice. This suggests that human activity affects the eating behavior of large predators. The results were published online
.
ecologists are increasingly aware that fear changes ecosystems. For example, predator intimidation can alter the behavior of prey, which in turn has a knock-on effect on other species.
previous study, Justine Smith and colleagues from the University of California found that jaguars kill more deer in more densely populated areas for unknown reasons. To do this, they designed an experiment to see if the appearance of humans would frighten jaguars and affect their eating. Humans are the leading cause of jaguar death in the region. They may be killed by eating goats or killed by vehicles. Historically, jaguars have also been hunted.
the team set up motion sensors, speakers and cameras at the recently found jaguar hunting in the Santa Cruz Mountains. When a jaguar comes to forage, the speaker plays a talk show clip or the Pacific tree frog's cry as a contrast.
29 tests on 17 jaguars, they escaped in 83 percent of the tests when human sounds were played. There has been only one response to the sound of tree frogs. If jaguars hear human voices, they will take longer to re-hunt their prey.
reaction seems to be bad news for the jaguar's main prey, the deer. "For large predators that hunt larger prey, eating less means they have to hunt again because they don't get enough energy from their prey." Smith said. (Source: Science Network Xu Xu)