Excessive hunting pressure is the leading cause of mammalian and avian endangerment, particularly in the tropics. A variety of mechanisms have been proposed that could explain the continued pursuit of increasingly overexploited and rare species, particularly when such species are highly valued, yet most focus on single-species bio-economic models. However, in the quasi-open access systems typical of the developing world, hunters target a wide range of species simultaneously. By recognizing that hunters can harvest any species within a portfolio of hunted game, one can identify the range of effort levels each species can sustain based on straightforward demographic and mass-action parameters. In addition, emerging survey techniques in human subjects research allow practitioners to be more agnostic to the actual drivers of hunting and instead focus on reported functional responses to wildlife catch rates.
Results/Conclusions
Using wildlife survey transects and human subjects interviews, we have characterized diverse non-pecuniary motivations on the part of hunters in Southwest China, and have linked hunter behavior and preferences with the distribution of prey body mass. Additionally, recreational covariates—rather than demographic or economic factors—are highly predictive of hunting in this landscape. I combine these insights in a predator-prey model of hunting, demonstrating that such recreational hunters in an open-access system can drive charismatic and valuable megafauna to extinction, and extend this model to consider how different conservation interventions—enhanced policing versus stocking an alternative and managed game system—could reduce the share of recreational hunters who harvest illegally.