We will start soon a 1 year (at least) camera trap project, where the main target will be mesocarnivores. Unfortunately, some animals like mongooses don´t have spots or truly individual marks and many pictures might be blurred, especially at night.
The idea is to use tags (e.g. hear tags, hair cuts, etc.) that will increase the chance of individual identification, even in worst conditions!
At the same time, we will be conducting box trapping sessions to capture several individuals.
Can someone suggest any easy and durable method to mark animals with the lowest impact possible?
Thanks a lot in advance
Best Regards
Filipe Carvalho
Hi,
In my experience, there is not a good way to mark the animals like mongoose. Hair cuts are temporal, and not very useful. Hear tags would be great, but they come off very soon. Maybe the best way is a plastic collar with geometrical marks. In this paper I've used spatial counts and I've marked (telemetry tag) only one Egyptian mongoose, but was enough to estimate the density.
Best,
Jose
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/312882505_Estimating_carnivore_community_structures
Article Estimating carnivore community structures
Hello,
Obviously with cats is easy
In case of other mesocarnívores normally we look for scars that indicate us what individual is. But not all animals sometimes have scars.
For closed populations (depending on the species) a good haircut helps a lot
Luck
Ohh sometimes some kind of dye (for hair) also helps.
Hi César. You are absolutely right, but at night, in blurry pics, would be very difficult to recognize a scar. In Spatial Mark Resight (SMR) the false negative could be a problem, and you'll need to use a character you can recognize in all pics. Obviously, if you can individualise an animal by skin pattern, you can use SCR or SMR, but the problem is if you can individualise the animal only in some pics, and you have a lot of false negatives.
Best,
Jose
Yeah!
I agree
But holding hands is not the solution.
So to test techniques and publish
Best
C
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