According to a new study, over time female elk are able to learn whether hunters are using either rifles or bows, and as a result, alter their behavior to make it harder for the hunters to shoot them.
Male elks rarely make it past five years of age, as they are hunted more excessively for their antlers. As for females, however, it seems that the older they get, the more they master avoiding humans and their weapons, becoming nearly invulnerable to human hunters by the time they reach around 10 years of age.
Published in PLOS ONE, a new study has shown that while the selective pressure from hunters was definitely impacting the animals, there was indeed a learning aspect to their movements as well.
The researchers wanted to clarify whether the extended survival of female elk was being driven by selection by humans – whereby the boldest animals are most likely to be killed while the reclusive ones are more likely to survive – or was instead triggered by learning. By tagging dozens of female elk of different ages in Canada and following them over a period of a few years, they studied the way the animals moved in their habitat, and how their behavior changed as they aged.
The team found that the more time passed, the more the animals were able to realize that by moving less, they could have a better chance of avoiding being spotted by hunters. In addition, older female elk adapted their behavior and habitat preference according to how risky the region they were moving through was. In riskier places, such as near roads, they tended to stay in safer grounds – rugged terrain and forest – where the likelihood of being spotted by hunters was lower.
Even more amazingly, the elk seemed to be able to differentiate between bow and rifle hunters, and alter their behavior accordingly. Since bow hunting requires hunters to get much closer to the animals in order to stalk their prey, during bow season older females would stick to rugged terrain more. Rifle hunters, in contrast, can shoot over distances of up to 300 meters, and so during rifle season the animals would avoid the roads and stay in more remote and inaccessible areas.
The researchers suspect that instead of knowing what season it was at any specific point of the year, the elk were instead taking their cues from how the hunters behaved. At the height of the rifle season, hunters tend to slow down on the roads so that they have a better chance of spotting the elk. Apparently, female elk learn this as they age, staying away from the roads and sticking to forests during this period.
The results could be critical in understanding the effects of human exploitation of wildlife populations with implications for improving their management and conservation. So hopefully, it will be the elk that will benefit from the research results, and not the hunters.
Sources: 1, 2, 3