Prey size mediates interference competition and predation dynamics in a large carnivore community

Direct competition for resources is especially fierce among predators, leading to disproportionately strong effects on fitness and functional roles. These competitive effects are exacerbated in complex predator guilds with dominance hierarchies that have clear winners and losers. The direct costs of losing these competitions are well understood, but the drivers of such interactions, and their indirect effects on prey, are not. We evaluate the drivers of interference competition for cougars, and how such competition affects cougar-prey dynamics, by leveraging 23 years of cougar predation data from Yellowstone National Park, USA. We show that the effect of prey size is context-dependent, negatively affecting how often cougars kill ungulate prey but positively affecting how often wolves/bears find and steal cougar kills. Further, cougars increasingly kill smaller prey as larger, primary prey density decreases. Handling time is shorter for smaller prey, leading to less kleptoparasitism by w..., Data was collected through predation cluster monitoring of GPS-collared cougars. Visited cougar kill sites to document remains, cause of death, scavenger/competitor presence, etc., , # Prey size mediates interference competition and predation dynamics in a large carnivore community

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.sxksn03c5](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.sxksn03c5)

## Description of the data and file structure

Data was collected through predation cluster monitoring of GPS-collared cougars from 2016-2022. Missing data represented as \"NA\".

Files:

**1) ck.covs.ungulate.csv**

Contains the following data columns related to each of the 350 individual cougars killed-ungulates included in analyses:

·      kill: unique identifier (e.g., year-nth kill of year)

·      study: one of three monitoring seasons

·      study_period: monitoring season and year

·      cougar_id: unique identifier of study cougar

·      cougar_sex: sex of study cougar

·      demographic_group: demographic group of study cougar

·      species: prey species common name

·      sex: sex of prey species

·      age_class: actual age class of prey

·      age_class_biomass: age class of prey used...,