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1 December 2010 Estimating age of carnivores from the Pantanal region of Brazil
Natalie Olifiers, Rita de Cassia Bianchi, Paulo Sérgio D'Andrea, Guilherme Mourão, Matthew E. Gompper
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Abstract

Conservation and management of animal populations often require knowledge about the age structure, but this information is usually difficult to discern. We propose a method to estimate the age of carnivores based on dental condition and body size measurements, and we apply the method to populations of brown-nosed coatis Nasua nasua and crab-eating foxes Cerdocyon thous in the Brazilian Pantanal. We sexed, weighed and measured 31 coatis and 45 foxes of known-age, and characterized and quantified their pattern of dental eruption and wear for the construction of a teeth condition index. Scores of the first factors of a principal component analysis including data on six body size measurements and the teeth condition index of the individuals were then used in a discriminant analysis to generate functions that can be used for estimating age of animals of unknown age. Models were validated using subsets of individuals of known age through a 3-fold cross validation process. The first functions accounted for over 90% of the discriminatory power for both species. Whereas in coatis, the first function was mainly explained by the body size measurements, in crab-eating foxes it was represented mainly by the teeth condition index. During model validation, individuals were on average classified with 88 and 80% average confidence for coatis and foxes, respectively. Our method is as accurate as other methods that are commonly applied to assess age, but less subjective. While it requires animal capturing, it is less invasive than methods requiring tissue removal such as analyses of teeth cementum annuli. The method we outlined can be used for age estimation of other populations, as long as the models are validated with a subset of animals from the region studied. It could also be useful as a model for estimating age of other carnivore species.

Natalie Olifiers, Rita de Cassia Bianchi, Paulo Sérgio D'Andrea, Guilherme Mourão, and Matthew E. Gompper "Estimating age of carnivores from the Pantanal region of Brazil," Wildlife Biology 16(4), 389-399, (1 December 2010). https://doi.org/10.2981/09-104
Received: 26 November 2009; Accepted: 1 October 2010; Published: 1 December 2010
KEYWORDS
age
body size
Brown-nosed coati
Cerdocyon thous
crab-eating fox
dental condition
Nasua nasua
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