Bayesian estimates of male and female African lion mortality for future use in population management

The global population size of African lions is plummeting, and many small fragmented populations face local extinction. Extinction risks are amplified through the common practice of trophy hunting for males, which makes setting sustainable hunting quotas a vital task. Various demographic models evaluate consequences of hunting on lion population growth. However, none of the models use unbiased estimates of male age-specific mortality because such estimates do not exist. Until now, estimating mortality from resighting records of marked males has been impossible due to the uncertain fates of disappeared individuals: dispersal or death. We develop a new method and infer mortality for male and female lions from two populations that are typical with respect to their experienced levels of human impact. We found that mortality of both sexes differed between the populations and that males had higher mortality across all ages in both populations. We discuss the role that different drivers of lio...非洲狮（African lions）的全球种群规模正急剧锐减，诸多碎片化的小型种群面临局地灭绝的危机。针对雄性个体的常规战利品狩猎（trophy hunting）进一步加剧了灭绝风险，这也使得制定可持续狩猎配额成为一项至关重要的任务。诸多种群统计模型均已针对狩猎行为对狮种群增长所带来的影响开展评估。然而，现有模型均未采用雄性个体按年龄划分的无偏死亡率估算值，原因在于此类估算值目前仍不存在。此前，由于失踪个体的命运（扩散或死亡）尚不明确，因此无法通过标记雄性个体的重见记录来估算其死亡率。本研究提出了一种全新方法，并基于两个具有典型人类干扰水平的狮种群数据，推断出雌雄狮的死亡率情况。研究结果显示，两个种群的雌雄狮死亡率均存在差异，且在两个种群中，雄性个体在所有年龄段的死亡率均高于雌性。我们还探讨了不同驱动因素对狮种群的影响作用（原文未完整呈现）。