Ain’t Nothing like Family—Female Brown Bears Share Their Home Range with Relatives

Sociality in animal populations is a continuum, and interactions between conspecifics are meaningful for all vertebrates. Ignorance of social structures can lead to misunderstanding their ecology and, consequently, to unsuccessful species management. Here, we combined genetic and spatial data on rad...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Diversity
Main Authors: Astrid Olejarz, Jouni Aspi, Ilpo Kojola, Vesa Nivala, Alina K. Niskanen, Jenni Harmoinen
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: MDPI AG 2022
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Online Access:https://doi.org/10.3390/d14010041
https://doaj.org/article/9e620d41ea034064b3b57439b2cace34
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Summary:Sociality in animal populations is a continuum, and interactions between conspecifics are meaningful for all vertebrates. Ignorance of social structures can lead to misunderstanding their ecology and, consequently, to unsuccessful species management. Here, we combined genetic and spatial data on radio-collared brown bears ( Ursus arctos ) to investigate kin-related home range overlap and kin-related centroid distance within central and eastern Finland. We found that the extent of home range overlap was positively correlated with relatedness among adult females. In addition, home range centroid distance decreased as relatedness increased. Moreover, there were significant differences between the two studied regions: female brown bears in central Finland were more closely related to each other, and the sizes of their home ranges were larger than those in eastern Finland. The smaller home ranges and lower degree of relatedness among bears in eastern Finland might be a result of the substantially higher hunting pressure in the area, combined with immigration of new unrelated individuals from Russia.