Abstract
Dry dog food is a potential attractant for carnivores, but it is scarcely used in mesocarnivore studies. We tested its efficiency by placing 50 independent sampling stations consisting in trios of camera traps baited with either dry dog food and valerian extract and a control without any attractant. We obtained 84 independent contacts including 39 mesocarnivore sightings in 150 camera-night samples. Community composition estimates were affected by attractants: diversity was higher and dominance smaller when using dry dog food than when using valerian extract. Dry dog food elicited three times more contacts than control cameras (mean ± SE = 0.48 ± 0.04 vs 0.15 ± 0.02 contacts/camera). Our results suggest the potential efficiency of dry dog food as an alternative attractant, either alone or used in combination with other traditional inedible baits in mesocarnivore studies.
Acknowledgments
Xavier Puig-Montserrat kindly borrowed the R-script to perform all the statistical analyses. The comments of two reviewers greatly improved the final version of the article. Prof. Mario Díaz made the final edition of the article.
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Author contributions: Field work: JG; experimental design: JG and IT; data analyses: JG, MV and IT; Writing: IT, MV and JG.
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Research funding: None declared.
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Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest regarding this article.
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Research ethics: All applicable international, national, and/or institutional guidelines for the care and use of animals were followed.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/mammalia-2020-0056).
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