Hunting and the implications for mammals in Belize

Hunting poses one of the greatest threats to tropical wildlife, yet wildlife is an important source of meat for some people. I conducted analyses of hunting pressure and patterns at the landscape and individual scales from 1997 to 2000 in southern Belize. I used cartridge purchases as an index of hunting pressure. The most purchases were made during the dry season and in January. More purchases were made by larger villages and villages located on the reserve boundaries. The fewest cartridges were purchased by villages with the greatest travel time to town, but these villages purchased the most cartridges per purchase. Approximately half of the variation in the number of cartridges purchased per village was explained by population size and proximity to the reserve boundaries, simultaneously. Numbers of hunters increased as village population size increased. The largest villages on the forest boundary had the greatest ratio of hunters to population size. The number of hunters in villages was highly predictive of the number of cartridges purchased per village. Villages closer to the forest had more hunters per capita than distant villages, and more hunters lived in villages at the forest boundary. More hunters lived in Maya villages.; Terrestrial neotropical frugivorous mammals are threatened by anthropogenic activities, primarily hunting and habitat destruction. The consequences to these species, and to ecological processes such as seed dispersal and predation, have implications for the persistence of tropical forests. I utilized remote video to record mammals at fruiting trees in three reserves, one of which was accessible and disturbed, and two which were remote and less disturbed. The majority of observations in the disturbed reserve were of smaller hunted species, whereas the majorities in the remote reserves were of the largest hunted species. Total biomass was greater in the remote reserves compared to the disturbed reserve. Ungulates comprised the majority of the biomass in the remote reserves, rodents comprised the majority in the disturbed reserve. In the disturbed reserve, the most biomass was represented by the smallest hunted species, and in the remote reserves, the most biomass was represented by the two largest species.