Research overview: Canada lynx movement and the snowshoe hare cycle

Canada lynx are tightly bound to snowshoe hares, whose populations cycle dramatically over roughly ten years, and this overview examines how lynx movement tracks these boom-and-bust dynamics. When hares crash, lynx undertake long-distance movements and even mass dispersals, traveling hundreds of kilometers in search of food, behavior documented through telemetry and recoveries. The overview discusses how lynx home-range size and movement expand as prey declines, how dispersal links populations across the boreal forest, and how the species' fortunes rise and fall with the hare cycle. Accelerometer and movement studies have also illuminated lynx and hare activity in the snow. Understanding this predator-prey movement coupling is central to lynx ecology and to managing populations at the southern edge of their range, where habitat is fragmented and hare densities lower.