These factors combine to make the most numerous deaths in the wild the least understood. Research to date has also focused on populations that come into conflict with or are used by humans. Although smaller animals exhibit the highest natural mortality rates, they are harder to monitor. The authors note that their dataset probably still greatly underestimates natural causes of death, considering that these deaths are often harder to detect. Birds, on the other hand, exhibited very similar cause-specific mortality rates between juvenile and adult age classes. For mammals and reptiles, predation was roughly twice as frequent in juveniles as in adults, with predation accounting for more than 95% of documented deaths of juvenile reptiles (Figure 1). They found that natural causes of death (predation, disease, starvation), especially predation, were common among juvenile animals irrespective of their species’ typical adult body size. expanded on this review with a vast amount of new data, including data from juveniles and non-mammalian vertebrates. This review found that, overall, predation was the most common cause of death for small-bodied mammals, while human-caused deaths, including hunting and vehicle collision, were the most common causes of death in larger mammals. They also limited their analysis to adult animals, due to a serious lack of data on juvenile mortality causes. ![]() Cause of death in wild terrestrial vertebratesĬollins and Kays ( 2011) conducted the first systematic review of cause-specific mortality rates in mammals, selecting only studies that used small radio trackers to monitor animals and document their deaths in a timely manner. ![]() Here, I will give an overview of what research in this field has taught us so far about how wild animals die and highlight gaps that seem especially important for welfare biology. The overwhelming majority of the research that does exist is focused on land-dwelling mammals and birds, and primarily on cases where understanding what animals are dying from is instrumental to preventing the extinction of their species. Cause of death has not received sufficient research attention relative to its significance to wild animal welfare. ![]() Previously, I wrote about approaches to studying wild animals’ causes of death, with the goal of making work in this field maximally useful for understanding wild animal welfare.
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