@brocksw i saw they had coyote and bobcat collared too. In your talking with the biologist did they mention if the predators are eating any of the dead CWD positive deer? We had EHD come through 3 years ago and nothing touched those deer.
Wisconsin releases preliminary results of Multi-year CWD study
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Bonasababy
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Predators eat positive still alive and dead deer. If your next question is can they get infected, I haven't seen any indication that's an issue--all cervids are susceptible though. I believe research so far suggests preadtors aren't a huge problem in moving prions around...Predators can help limit the spread through targeting of ill/dying deer though...
Predator Impacts on the Spread of Chronic Wasting Disease - The National Wildlife Federation Blog
There are several challenges and considerations in making predictions about the impacts of predation on the prevalence and spread of CWD.
@Bonasababy thanks for the reply read that link and it seems to be contradicting itself in places. I know the science isn't perfect. But it said on the front range yes lions selected infected deer but in another area they didn't so any preference. Also it said lions only excrete 3% of prions but crows had much more of an affect. I honestly didn't expect them to really move much around so was surprised it was even 3% and higher in crow feces.
I really had no other follow up for @brocksw other than I was genuinely interested if the WI deer where being eaten after death by coyotes or bobcats. As it was super interesting when we put a camera over a fresh EHD carcass and it wasn't touched by predators. Was curious if they "knew" the animal was bad as they seemed to with the EHD deer. It was weird we would find full almost perfect skeletons.
I really had no other follow up for @brocksw other than I was genuinely interested if the WI deer where being eaten after death by coyotes or bobcats. As it was super interesting when we put a camera over a fresh EHD carcass and it wasn't touched by predators. Was curious if they "knew" the animal was bad as they seemed to with the EHD deer. It was weird we would find full almost perfect skeletons.
huntin24/7
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I’m curious to see what’s going to happen from a deer hunter participation stand point in relation to this in the next 10 years or so. I would think as infection rates increase, at some point, meat hunters will probably be less interested in hunting deer(even if they don’t feel there’s a chance of the disease eventually being infectious to humans). As cwd itself and management practices related to cwd increase, I would think less people would be interested in shooting young small bucks year after year that have a decent chance of being infected anyways.
brocksw
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I havent really seen any of that data. In one of the pictures I shared on post #2, there was an end stage deer that was seen on camera before she died, but consumed/scavenged before they could respond to the mortality signal.
I can say that in the information I’ve heard, it doesn’t seem like predators were bothered by it. At least not significantly. There were several instances where they arrived at a mortality signal to find a scavenged corpse on a positive deer.
Our Game and Fish here in ND just had a similar experience. I think just this last year they got a report from a landowner in one of our hot spots that there was a sickly looking deer next to the road. Game and fish folks got there 18 hours later and it was nothing but a freshly scavenged skeleton.
But I’ve heard what you mention about EHD before. Though to my understanding, and maybe I’m completely wrong about this, the going thought seems to be that scavengers have no problem with eating EHD deer. What happens is during an EHD outbreak you have bunches of deer dying at the same time, more than what the local coyote population can eat. So some of them appear to not get touched. But it’s simply a function of excess food on the landscape for a short window. But I don’t know if there’s any solid research to back that up.
Wish I had a better answer for you.
No that makes perfect sense about the EHD vs CWD. It was really weird that the deer we had the camera on didn't get scavenger. Between ours and the 4 neighbors roughly 3k acres in total we all found 29 deer that spring within a week so would make sense coyote couldn't keep up.
I was thinking maybe the scavengers "knew" the deer was sick.
Bonasababy
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Not sure I'm seeing what you saw. When they say there's a selective preference for infected deer, it means the predators are identifying sick deer and targeting them more than other prey they may have available.
This was observed in both places noted. The hypothesis in play was that selective targeting if infected animals by predators helps reduce transmission of CWD. In AZ though it was not noted that predation helped to limit spread of CWD...the authors felt that may be due to deer in that location being concentrated due to the benefits of concentration to individual survival when predators are common where deer live. The concentration likely washes out the otherwise positive benefits of selection of sick deer as CWD spreads more readily if deer are concentrated/ have more close or direct contact with each other.
Their take home lesson is that predators can help limit transmission but other local factors may wash out that benefit....and more research in different places is needed.
Regarding excretion of prions by predators...the thought was that could help spread CWD...but in lions the excreted amount was quite a bit less than taken in and in crows they had two thoughts...one that a flock would shed a lot underneath a communal roost...but if that is somewhere removed from where deer are concentrated they might be helping to limit CWD spread....lesson there was more research is needed too.
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