Data from: Puma responses to unreliable human cues suggest an ecological trap in a fragmented landscape

Animals’ fear of people is widespread across taxa and can mitigate the
risk of human-induced mortality, facilitating coexistence in
human-dominated landscapes. However, humans can be unpredictable predators
and anthropogenic cues that animals perceive may not be reliable
indicators of the risk of being killed. In these cases, animal fear
responses may be ineffective and may even exacerbate the risk of
anthropogenic mortality. Here, we explore these questions using a 10-year
dataset of movement and mortality events for the puma (Puma concolor)
population in the fragmented Santa Cruz Mountains of California, for whom
the leading cause of death was retaliatory killings by people following
livestock loss. We modeled retaliatory killing risk and puma habitat
selection relative to residential housing density to evaluate whether puma
avoidance of human cues reflected their risk of being killed. We
documented a mismatch between human cues, fear responses, and actual risk.
Rather than scaling directly with housing density, retaliatory killings
occurred at intermediate levels of human development and at night. Pumas
avoided these areas during the day but selected for these high-risk areas
at night, resulting in a mismatch between cue and risk impacting 17% of
the study area. These results are unlikely to be driven by puma hunting
behavior: livestock constitute a very small proportion of puma diets, and
we found no evidence for the alternative hypothesis that state-dependent
foraging drove depredation of livestock and subsequent retaliatory
killings. Our findings indicate that puma responses to human cues are not
sufficient to enable human-carnivore coexistence in this area and suggest
that reducing risk from humans in places with few perceptible human cues
would facilitate carnivore conservation in human-dominated landscapes.
Furthermore, a mismatch between human cues and responses by carnivores can
lead to selection rather than avoidance of risky areas, which could result
in an ecological trap.