The field study, conducted by biologists in the California desert along Santa Cruz, clearly demonstrates how far the bombs avoid meeting people. And the idea of a sneaky beast lurking in tree branches above a hiking trail on the first juicy tripter with a backpacker gets a lot of shit. Justine Smith, who specializes in large American beasts, has come up relatively simply.
She picked up several of the places that bombs are visiting during the day. Most often, they were large pieces of decked game, among which the bombs move freely within their territory and are continuously married. She installed a video recorder and a sound recorder - and then she just waited. When some such dreaded puma appeared, and let go of the food, Smith turned the "sailboat" remotely.
From him, the sounds of the distant human conversation began to fade away, gradually approaching. This soundtrack, which was supposed to simulate a relatively close movement of people, had almost always a devastating effect on the bomb. The fearless and fearless beast immediately left the feed and disappeared in the thickets. Smith, along with her colleagues, was embarrassed by a feast of seventeen different bombs and almost always with the effect described.
Understandably, like her colleagues at the University of Berkeley, she had to ask whether the bombs are scaring the human voice, or just the unexpected presence of an unexpected source of noise. Therefore, it has expanded its experiment with a total of 28 audio items. Among them there could be sounds of pure nature (noise of trees), disturbing sounds (varying volume of human speech volume) and for control and sound, although natural, but atypical at the site - frogs.
The American Pumps did not change their attitude towards the approaching people in these tests. While the natural sound background was momentarily alert and continued to eat, the approaching human voices took them away in 83% of cases. In just one recorded case, the frog's voice was cast off. "We can definitely say that these are bombs who are afraid of people," says Smith. This particular study gave the subject a completely different aspect of the life of the bomb. "We've noticed earlier that the bombs are avoiding places where they could meet people."
And where people can be found, bums are reluctant to re-use their animals. Wherever, for example, deer, they are fed only once, but only half the likelihood that they will return to this untapped feast will be reduced. On the other hand, it leads to the fact that the bombs have to catch more deer (up to 36%) in areas where people meet.
"It's actually one of the first studies to experimentally demonstrate the effect of fear on large carnivores," says Chris Wilmers, a professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. "Fear is the mechanism that starts the ecological cascade, flowing from humans to animals. The disturbance of human populations by humans may not be straightforward in this plane, such as the limitation of their hunting stock. The fear of a beast from humans in California leads to a change in the pressure exerted on the population of the roe deer. When we enter US territory, we will influence what and how it will hunt and eat. "
Author: Radomír Dohnal
Source: Ekolist.cz
