Got this off a newsgroup

UW study shows deer in CWD zone stick to home
October 24, 2005
University of Wisconsin-Madison

White-tailed deer, it seems, are homebodies.

That is the upshot of an intensive study of the traveling behaviors of 173 radio-collared white-tailed deer in south central Wisconsin. The new results, which surprised researchers by revealing how little deer move about the landscape, are important because they may help researchers and wildlife managers better understand how chronic wasting disease (CWD) spreads.

"They are using small home ranges and not traveling long distances," says Nancy Mathews, a wildlife biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison's Gaylord Nelson Institute for Environmental Studies. "The only dispersers are young males, and they only go five to seven miles before setting up a new home range."

Mathews and Lesa Skuldt, her student in the UW-Madison department of wildlife ecology, presented findings from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources-funded study recently at the annual Wildlife Society conference held in Madison.

The results of the study are both encouraging and confounding, says Mathews. On the one hand, knowing more about how deer move about the landscape may help scientists home in on how CWD spreads among wild deer. On the other hand, the findings contradict the idea that deer are great travelers, moving long distances and possibly taking the disease with them.
"Based on the behavior of these deer, we cannot account for the distribution of CWD on the landscape," says Mathews who, with her students, conducted intensive, year-round telemetric studies of deer fitted with radio transmitters for the past two-and-one-half years.

"Adult does and their female fawns establish home ranges in the same location where they were born and stay there for their entire life," Mathews explains. "Once young bucks have dispersed, they too establish small home ranges and rarely leave them, even during the rut. Deer are not moving long distances, except for young bucks."

First identified in Wisconsin deer in 2001, CWD is a fatal brain disease found in deer and elk. It is transmitted through an agent called a prion, an abnormal protein that causes brain damage and, subsequently, the characteristic symptoms of the diseases: staggering, shaking, and excessive salivation, thirst and urination. There is no cure or treatment.
Nor do scientists know how the disease is transmitted from one animal to another.

Understanding how deer use the landscape may help answer that question, says Mathews, by providing insight into the movement and behaviors of animals in an area where the disease has gained a toehold.

Scientists have generally assumed that deer transmit the infectious prions among themselves through direct contact. One alternate hypothesis is that areas where deer congregate - mineral licks, for example - may become hotspots for the disease. In those areas deer frequently lick the soil. They leave behind saliva that may also contain prions. Whether that behavior and the consumption of contaminated soil is at all associated with transmission is speculative, Mathews emphasizes, "but we can't rule out deer congregating around hot spots as another means of transmission."

In their new study, what the Wisconsin scientists found to their surprise was that deer in south central Wisconsin use very small home ranges, about one-half square mile in size. These ranges tended to be smaller in areas with a higher amount of forest edge. It may be, she says, that deer in the area have an abundance of high quality resources - food, water, mates - and do not need to travel long distances to find those resources on the south central Wisconsin landscape. The study also shows that the size of deer home ranges was not related to the number of deer harvested or deer density.

In general, according to the study's results, females and adult males stay close to home. Young bucks travel on average five to seven miles from their home range to establish new territories.

Young deer of both sexes, says Mathews, do tend to go on "exploratory" excursions lasting for less than a week, but they eventually return to their home range and family groups.

"They always come back and the females never leave, so it is unlikely they are contributing to large-scale transmission of CWD," says Mathews. "A big key for understanding transmission is young bucks. They are the only segment of the population that makes permanent movement out of their home ranges."

Mathews also found that even after one CWD positive doe was found in a social group of females, other females in the group continue to test negative. She says this suggests that CWD is not spreading rapidly among females within social groups.

The study was initiated in January of 2003 and results through June of 2005 constitute the data in Mathews and Skuldt's new report. Deer were fitted with radio collars and tracked intensively with each animal's range on the landscape being determined a minimum of 37 times a season or 148 times a year. Deer were located at all times of the day with the exception of midnight to 3 a.m.

quote:

Based on the behavior of these deer, we cannot account for the distribution of CWD on the landscape

Perhaps scientists should start looking at the environmental factors that might be related to its genesis instead of rejecting them out of hand or thwarting that line of inquiry.

quote:

White-tailed deer, it seems, are homebodies.

Not sure why that would surprise researchers? I don't see anything in that report in regards to whitetail movement patterns that is any different from what I saw in wildlife texts 25 years ago.

Jeff

They probably spent millions reinventing the wheel !! Yes deer habits have been known for a long time. For example "the Deer of North America" by Rue, it's all spelled out. I guess the modern "researchers" don't know how to read !When I did scientific research the first step was to do a literature search.

What they didn't take into consideration is that deer farms and fenced deer hunting operations buy deer from all over and transport them into their enclosures. It is fairly easy to see why the disease spread so rapidly, especially in areas where the population of deer was in excess of carrying capacity for the ecosystem.

Expanding a relatively short (2.5 year) study of deer in one relatively small area to general populations as diverse and distant as the U.S. is quite a leap...

I'm immediately curious as to how heavy environmental factors can influence this behavior. They might stay put for generations, and then one good drought makes them spread out for food and disperse hundreds of miles in a few years.

I have no trouble believing that a stable population with no real pressure (predator/food/water/weather issues) stays put the majority of the time, but it's still a little far reaching IMO.

I live in the area where the bulk of this study was done. Some of the animals that the researchers trapped were actually taken from the farm where I hunt. As an aside, it was interesting to watch how long they struggled to live trap their first deer back when the study began.

Given what I know about this particular area compared to other areas where I have hunted, it would be a strech to generalize the data that they have collected and suggest that they apply to other populations in different regions. One thing that I am sure will strongly bias the data gathered in this study is the availability of food sources in the area. This part of Wisconsin has large pockets of CRP interwoven with agricultural land. In addition, there is quite a bit of wooded land to boot.

I know that several of the traps the researchers had set up were on or adjacent to agricultural land. The deer will tend to stay in those areas where there is a good cheap meal! As such, it does not surprise me at all that the deer they trapped on and around ag land will tend to stay on and around ag land where they can feast!

That not withstanding, there is a long haul on addressing the CWD problem here. The population of deer continues to boom since landowners in the area have been dead set at the DNR's goal of thinning the herd in the "Disease Eradication Zone" (DEZ) to a population goal of 0. I am in support of trying to get the population down as low as possible but it can't be done with just a few people hunting on one or two farms!

Wow! Easy on the wildlife researchers guys...you never know where one may lurk.....

IV

Idaho how could I have guessed.

Could of it been all the pro wolf rantings.

Hold on there guys, first the above pasting is not the actual research paper, it's a news release where someone (probably a newspaper columnist or someone similar) is trying to paraphrase what was written in the actual paper. I've met Nancy Mathews and had the same advisor as her in graduate school. I can say for certain that she already was aware of the home range habits of W-T deer before this paper came out or even before she started this project. If you do a literature review of her name in the Journal of Wildlife Management and the Bulletin, you'll see she knows what she is talking about.

I'd suggest that if you haven't read the actual paper, take it easy on the researchers.
Jon

mmmmmmmm....maybe. But remember, I am not necessarily pro-wolf---am just not anti-wolf until I see more---but that is another thread...

IV