When to stay and when to leave? Proximate causes of dispersal in an endangered social carnivore

1. Reliable estimates of birth, death, emigration, and immigration rates are fundamental to understanding and predicting the dynamics of wild populations and, consequently, inform appropriate management actions. However, when individuals disappear from a focal population, inference on their fate is often challenging.

2. Here we used 30 years of individual-based mark-recapture data from a population of free-ranging African wild dogs (Lycaon pictus) in Botswana and a suite of individual, social, and environmental predictors to investigate factors affecting the decision to emigrate from the pack. We subsequently used this information to assign an emigration probability to those individuals that were no longer sighted within their pack (i.e. missing individuals).

3. Natal dispersal (i.e. emigration from the natal pack) showed seasonal patterns with female dispersal peaking prior to the mating season and male dispersal peaking at the beginning of the wet season. For both sexes, natal...