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DISEASE ECOLOGY

Hunting shapes wildlife disease transmission

Nature Ecology & Evolution volume 6, pages 136–137 (2022)Cite this article

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A landscape-level natural experiment in free-ranging pumas reveals how changes in hunting pressure alter viral evolution and infection dynamics through indirect effects on puma population size, demography and behaviour.

Humans have manipulated wildlife populations for thousands of years. Today, the goals of wildlife management extend from ensuring sustainable ‘crops’ of game species to reducing human–wildlife conflict and, more recently, to preventing or controlling the spread of infectious diseases1. Perhaps the most common tool used by wildlife managers has been culling or recreational hunting, both of which have been shown to have implications for infectious disease outcomes across multiple systems. Writing in Nature Ecology & Evolution, Fountain-Jones et al.2 leverage varied management regimes and cutting-edge genetic and modelling approaches to examine how changes in hunting pressure affect the transmission and evolution of feline immunodeficiency virus (FIV) in a Colorado puma (Puma concolor) population. They contrast pathogen dynamics in pumas undergoing changes in hunting pressure over time (‘treatment’) to pumas experiencing minimal hunting under consistent management (‘stable’). Through this unique natural experiment, their results connect the cessation of hunting and subsequent increase in male survival with an increase in viral transmission and evolution.

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Fig. 1: Changes in host and pathogen dynamics as a result of wildlife management strategy.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Food and Agriculture, University of Maine, Orono, ME, USA

    Pauline L. Kamath & Melanie B. Prentice

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  1. Pauline L. Kamath
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  2. Melanie B. Prentice
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Correspondence to Pauline L. Kamath.

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The authors declare no competing interests.

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Kamath, P.L., Prentice, M.B. Hunting shapes wildlife disease transmission. Nat Ecol Evol 6, 136–137 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41559-021-01633-7

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