Restricting movements to familiar areas should increase individual fitness as it provides animals with information about the spatial distribution of resources and predation risk. While the benefits of familiarity for locating resources have been reported previously, the potential value of familiarity for predation avoidance has been accorded less attention. It has been suggested that familiarity should be beneficial for anti-predator behaviour when direct cues of predation risk are unclear and do not allow prey to identify well defined spatial refuges. However, to our knowledge, this hypothesis has yet to be tested. Here, we assessed how site familiarity, measured as the intensity of use of a given location, is associated with the probability of roe deer (Capreolus capreolus) being killed by two predators with contrasting hunting tactics, the Eurasian lynx (Lynx lynx) and human hunters. While risk of human hunting was confined to open habitats, risk of lynx predation was more diffuse, with no clear refuge areas. We estimated cause-specific mortality rates in a competing risk framework for 212 GPS-collared roe deer in two ecologically distinct areas of Central Europe to test the hypothesis that the daily risk of being killed by lynx or hunters should be lower in areas of high familiarity. We found strong evidence that site familiarity reduces the risk of being predated by lynx, whereas the evidence that the risk of being hunted is linked to site familiarity was weak. We suggest that local knowledge about small scale differences in predation risk and information about efficient escape routes affect an individual's ability to avoid or escape an attack by an ambush predator. Our study emphasises the role of site familiarity in determining the susceptibility of prey to predation. Further research will be required to better understand how a cognitive map of individual spatial information is beneficial for avoiding predation in the arms race that drives the predator-prey shell game.

中文翻译：

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待在家里，保持安全——熟悉场地可降低两个对比鲜明的研究场地中大型食草动物的捕食风险

将活动限制在熟悉的区域应该会增加个体的健康，因为它为动物提供了关于资源空间分布和捕食风险的信息。虽然之前已经报道了熟悉定位资源的好处，但熟悉避免捕食的潜在价值却很少受到关注。有人建议，当捕食风险的直接线索不清楚并且不允许猎物识别明确定义的空间避难所时，熟悉应该有利于反捕食者的行为。然而，据我们所知，这个假设还有待检验。在这里，我们评估了场地熟悉度（以给定位置的使用强度衡量）与狍（狍狍）被两种捕食策略不同的捕食者杀死的概率之间的关系，欧亚猞猁（Lynx lynx）和人类猎人。虽然人类狩猎的风险仅限于开阔的栖息地，但猞猁捕食的风险更加分散，没有明确的避难区。我们在中欧两个生态不同地区的竞争风险框架中估计了 212 头带 GPS 项圈的狍的特定原因死亡率，以检验以下假设：在高度熟悉的地区，每天被猞猁或猎人杀死的风险应该较低. 我们发现强有力的证据表明，熟悉场地可以降低被猞猁捕食的风险，而表明被猎杀风险与场地熟悉程度相关的证据很弱。我们建议，关于捕食风险的小规模差异的本地知识和有关有效逃生路线的信息会影响个人避免或逃避伏击捕食者攻击的能力。我们的研究强调了场地熟悉度在确定猎物对捕食的敏感性方面的作用。需要进一步研究以更好地了解个体空间信息的认知地图如何有利于避免军备竞赛中的掠食行为，而军备竞赛推动了捕食者-猎物壳游戏。