Cougar kill rate and prey composition in a multiprey system

Knopff and colleagues used GPS location clusters to investigate cougar kills in Alberta, dramatically improving on snow-tracking by detecting small and warm-season prey often missed before. They estimated kill rates and prey composition across seasons and demographic classes, finding cougars killed a wide array of prey from deer and elk to beavers and smaller mammals, with kill rates varying by prey size and cougar sex and reproductive status. The study showed that consumption-based metrics (biomass per unit time) are more biologically meaningful than raw kill counts and corrected biases in earlier estimates. It is a methodological benchmark for quantifying solitary-felid predation in multi-prey systems and informs ungulate management.