slides notes

Vocabulary practice flashcards covering predation dynamics, animal behavior, movement ecology, and wildlife harvest management.

Predation

An ecological interaction where animals kill and consume other animals.

Functional Response

The increase in the average number of prey items consumed per predator in response to an increase in prey population density.

Numerical Response

An increase in the predator population size or density in response to increases in the prey population.

Total Effect of Predation

The combined impact of a predator's functional response and numerical response that dictates the overall predation rate on a prey population.

Predator Regulation

The ability of predators to control and hold a prey population at a stable equilibrium below the carrying capacity ($K$) of the environment.

Predator Density vs. Kill Rate Dynamics

The demographic phenomenon demonstrated in Michigan's Upper Peninsula where abundant predators with low individual kill rates (black bears and coyotes) exert greater overall predation on fawns than scarce predators with high individual kill rates (bobcats and wolves).

Femur Marrow Water Content

A physiological indicator of ungulate nutritional condition where elevated marrow water content signifies extreme fat catabolism and imminent starvation.

Ethology

The scientific study of the biological and evolutionary foundations of animal behavior.

Behavioral Ecology

The study of how ecological constraints influence animal behavior and how individual behavior in turn affects population and community dynamics.

Habitat Use

The proportion of time spent by an animal in a specific habitat type over a fixed interval of observation.

Selective Habitat Use

The disproportionate utilization of a habitat type relative to its physical availability across the landscape.

Habitat Preference

The habitat choices an animal would make if all potential habitats were equally accessible and available.

Hierarchical Scales of Selection

A nested framework describing habitat selection from first-order (geographic/population range), to second-order (individual home range within the population range), to third-order selection (specific habitat patches or telemetry locations within the home range).

Home Range

The total geographic area traversed by an individual animal during its normal routine of feeding, mating, resting, and caring for young over daily, seasonal, and annual scales.

Territory

The actively defended, exclusive portion of an animal's home range that prevents competitors from accessing critical resources.

Floating Population

A segment of mature, non-territorial individuals that do not breed due to a lack of available territories but remain capable of rapid recruitment into the breeding population if territorial holders are removed.

Natal Dispersal

The one-way movement of an individual animal from the site or home range where it was born or hatched to the location where it first establishes a territory or reproduces.

Breeding Dispersal

The movement of adult animals to new home ranges, territories, or breeding locations between successive reproductive attempts.

Latitudinal Migration

The long-distance seasonal north-south movement of animals to exploit cyclical, geographically separated resource pulses and favorable climatic conditions.

Elevational Migration

The seasonal movement of animals up and down mountain elevation gradients to track plant green-up, avoid deep snow, or escape thermal stress.

Flyway System

A four-unit administrative and biological network (Pacific, Central, Mississippi, and Atlantic) used in North America by state and federal councils to collaboratively manage migratory bird populations and harvest regulations.

Western Hemisphere Shorebird Reserve Network (WHSRN)

A conservation partnership dedicated to identifying and protecting an interconnected network of key stopover, nesting, and staging wetland sites critical for long-distance migratory shorebirds across the Americas.

Courtship Behavior

Ritualized behavioural displays and stimulus-response sequences stimulated by hormones and environmental cues that lead to species recognition and copulation.

American Woodcock Singing Ground Survey

A standardized monitoring protocol consisting of $10$ roadside stops spaced $0.4\,\text{mi}$ ($0.6\,\text{km}$) apart, where an observer listens for exactly $2\,\text{minutes}$ per stop to tally peenting males within a strict $38\,\text{minute}$ window after sunset.

Habituation

A learning process wherein wild animals become accustomed to human presence, structures, or non-natural elements, losing their normal avoidance responses.

Imprinting

A rapid, permanent, and irreversible form of social learning that occurs during a critical, sensitive period of early developmental life in young animals.

Sustainable Harvest

A wildlife management strategy in which the rate of human removal can be maintained indefinitely without degrading population viability or reproductive potential.

Harvestable Surplus

The demographic recruitment increment produced above replacement when harvest reduces population density below environmental carrying capacity ($K$), causing $\Delta N / \Delta t > 0$.

Maximum Sustainable Yield (MSY)

The theoretical maximum number of individuals that can be regularly harvested from a population without long-term depletion, achieved at approximately $\frac{1}{2}K$ where population net growth rate ($dN/dt$) is highest under logistic growth.

Threshold of Security

Paul Errington's concept defining the carrying capacity ceiling of high-quality habitat cover, beneath which animals are secure from predation and above which excess individuals are doomed to die.

Doomed Surplus Strategy

A management concept proposing that seasonal population surpluses exceeding the threshold of security will perish from overwinter natural causes and can thus be harvested by hunters with complete compensation.

Compensatory Mortality Hypothesis (CMH)

The theory that hunting mortality replaces natural non-hunting mortality up to a threshold kill rate, leaving the total annual survival rate unaffected until that threshold is crossed.

Additive Mortality Hypothesis (AMH)

The theory that non-hunting mortality is independent of hunting kill rates and density, meaning every animal removed by hunting directly lowers total annual survival.

Partial Compensation Hypothesis

A harvest mortality dynamic falling between additive and complete compensation, where hunting replaces some natural mortality below the threshold but still causes a slight decline in overall survival.

Adaptive Harvest Management (AHM)

An iterative, science-based decision process used in North American waterfowl harvest that explicitly accounts for management uncertainty by testing competing population models and updating their weights annually based on survey observations.

AHM Competing Models

A set of four alternative population dynamics models representing combinations of additive vs. compensatory hunting mortality and strong vs. weak density-dependent recruitment.

Structural Uncertainty

Uncertainty regarding the true mathematical formulation and biological mechanisms governing population responses to harvest, predation, and environmental conditions.

Partial Controllability

The inability of wildlife managers to achieve precise harvest levels due to variations in hunter participation, effort, and harvest success despite fixed regulations.

Partial Observability

The uncertainty arising from measurement error, sampling variance, and incomplete detection when monitoring animal population abundance and habitat parameters.

Environmental Variation

Random, uncontrollable ecological fluctuations such as precipitation, winter severity, and temperature that directly drive reproductive output and survival.