Development of noninvasive genetic techniques to monitor elusive carnivores; A case study of bobcats (Lynx rufus) in the Northern Lower Peninsula, Michigan.

摘要

Effective and cost-efficient methods of obtaining noninvasive genetic samples would greatly aid monitoring efforts for elusive or rare carnivores. We compared the efficacy of two methods for obtaining bobcat (Lynx rufus) genetic samples in the Northern Lower Peninsula (NLP), Michigan: detector dogs trained to find scat samples, and hair snares. Hair snares generated many more samples than detector dogs; however, only two hair samples yielded bobcat multilocus genotypes, while scat samples yielded 9 genotypes. Our results support the detector dog method over hair snares for monitoring the MI NLP bobcat population, both in terns of overall efficacy (