Data from: Trophy hunters pay more to target larger-bodied carnivores

Hunters often target species that require resource investment
disproportionate to associated nutritional rewards. Costly signalling
theory provides a potential explanation, proposing that hunters target
species that impose high costs (e.g. higher failure and injury risks,
lower consumptive returns) because it signals an ability to absorb costly
behaviour. If costly signalling is relevant to contemporary ‘big game’
hunters, we would expect hunters to pay higher prices to hunt taxa with
higher perceived costs. Accordingly, we hypothesized that hunt prices
would be higher for taxa that are larger-bodied, rarer, carnivorous, or
described as dangerous or difficult to hunt. In a data set on 721 guided
hunts for fifteen North American large mammals, prices listed online
increased with body size in carnivores (from approximately $550 to $1800
USD/day across the observed range). This pattern suggests that elements of
costly signals may persist among contemporary non-subsistence hunters.
Persistence might simply relate to deception, given that signal honesty
and fitness benefits are unlikely in such different conditions compared
with ancestral environments in which hunting behaviour evolved. If
larger-bodied carnivores are generally more desirable to hunters, then
conservation and management strategies should consider not only the
ecology of the hunted but also the motivations of hunters.