The meat from wild animals, or wild meat, is critical to the survival of rural and
Indigenous people worldwide. Typically, these communities live in remote places
where access to domestic meats is limited. Unregulated wild meat extraction
alongside the increasing demand by urban residents can impact game species
populations. In the Amazon, limited information is available on the drivers of wild
meat use and trade in rural and urban areas. Knowledge of life-history
parameters of Amazonian game species, useful for determining their resilience
to hunting, is also lacking. In this thesis I: 1) investigate patterns and drivers of
wild meat consumption and trade in the Amazon, and 2) present new data on lifehistory parameters of a widely hunted species, the lowland paca (Cuniculus
paca), and advance ways of gathering such data from the wild. In the first part of
the thesis, I study the consumption of wild meat by rural and urban households
in Amazonas, the largest state in Brazil. I demonstrate that the number of hunters
living in rural households determines the rates of consumption and the probability
of trading wild meat. I show that flavour of certain species increases their
consumption rates, and body mass of the species determines its trade price. I
also model the relationship between wild meat use and a selection of important
socioeconomic indices in five cities in the Brazilian Amazon. I use the results of
this model to scale up to all of 62 main urban settlements in Amazonas. This is
the first large-scale estimation of wild meat amounts consumed and traded across
the entire Brazilian Amazon. I found that the frequency of wild meat consumption
in these cities was positively correlated with the proportion of rural population and
with the per capita gross domestic product of the municipality. I estimate 10,691
tonnes of wild meat consumed annually in central Amazonia, 6.49 kg per person
per year, and US21.72perpersonorUS35.1 million annual overall in terms of
trade. In the second part of my thesis, I investigate the reproductive parameters
of the lowland paca from data collected using community-based hunting
monitoring and collection of biological materials. I used information gathered over
17 years in a site in Brazil and another in Peru. I found that lowland pacas
reproduce seasonally. Moreover, the period of the year when more pregnant
females were found overlaps with the period of higher hunting rates, which may
likely affect populations of the species. I also found that the species reaches
maturity at 4 months of age, at least 3 months earlier than previously reported in
the literature. No signs of senescence in the species was detected. I then tested
the efficacy of local people in diagnosing pregnancy in hunted female lowland
pacas, and used these results to correct hunted specimens’ reproductive status
data, voluntarily collected by hunters as part of a citizen science project. I show
that local people correctly diagnosed pregnancy in 72.5% and 88.2% of tests
before and after training, respectively. Monthly pregnancy rates determined by
hunters and by researchers were similar. Reported annual pregnancy rates were
negatively correlated with the productivity of hunting events, and positively
associated with the percentage of immatures in the hunted population. This
demonstrates that the voluntary diagnosis of game species’ reproductive status
by local people is a feasible method to obtain accurate life-history parameters.
The information presented in this thesis can help ascertain sustainability of wild
meat use in Amazonia
