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spatiotemporal patterns in hunting
spatiotemporal patterns in hunting
Photograph by Wilfredo Martinez
We use participatory mapping and interview techniques in collaboration with Maijuna hunters to understand Maijuna hunting patterns across the landscape and through time. Maijuna ancestral lands are dynamic, changing rapidly as you move geographically and as the seasons change. Hunters change their behavior and movement accordingly, and it's possible that game mammal populations do as well.
current questions
current questions
How will the proposed highway through Maijuna lands impact hunter movement and behavior?
How does Maijuna culture influence patterns of hunting?
recent findings
recent findings
Hunter Territoriality Creates Primate Refuges
Hunter Territoriality Creates Primate Refuges
We found that Maijuna hunters generally hunt in family-specific zones, though these norms are unwritten and unspoken. The "territories" of hunters are often distinct from each other. This territoriality spreads hunters out across the landscape, limiting hunting pressure on any individual region. Furthermore, some hunters do not hunt primates because of personal or cultural taboos. When combined with territoriality, this partial preference against primates creates a mosaic of hunting pressure on primates across the landscape, where primates are totally safe inside the territories of some hunters and vulnerable in others. This is a system of sources and sinks, where primates can reproduce in, and disperse from, refuges where hunters don't target them. This passive management system is rooted in cultural and social norms, and likely contributes to the sustainability of hunting and the food security of hunters.
Small primates, like the squirrel monkey (Saimiri sciureus) and black-mantled tamarin (Saguinus nigricollis) shown here, are almost always ignored.
Complex Seasonal Changes in Hunting
Complex Seasonal Changes in Hunting
We found that spatial patterns of hunting drastically change seasonally according to rainfall and the riverine flood pulses that follow. Maijuna hunters often use the river to facilitate access to more remote regions, and their movement is severely limited during the dry season when they are stuck nearby the community. During the dry season, hunters were mostly hunting on land and targeting the collared peccary as their preferred species. During the rainy season, hunters were mostly hunting by canoe and targeting the lowland paca. Interestingly, hunters are much more successful in the dry season, with a predicted catch per unit effort that is almost four times higher than in the rainy season. Since rainfall limits hunter movement, all game species in the north of the river basin are safe from hunting for large portions of the year. Paca in the south are more safe during the dry season. These spatial and temporal variations in hunting likely contribute to a sustainable hunting system and therefore continued food security and economic stability of the Maijuna.
This animation demonstrates seasonal shifts in hunting. The community is the square in the south, and more red means more hunting.
Proxy Metrics for Hunting Pressure
Proxy Metrics for Hunting Pressure
Hunting pressure is incredibly time intensive to measure, requiring lots of participatory mapping interviews with hunters or following hunters with a GPS. We found that a simple model using three distance-based proxies for hunting pressure was an accurate predictor of measured hunting pressure: distance from the community, hunting camps, and major access points (rivers and trails). These proxies can be used to model the effects of hunting on animal movement and occupancy as a stand-in for more time-intensive methods.
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