Raccoons may be Toronto's unofficial mascot, but the furry creatures that plunder our green bins are far from the only wild animals that live among us.
"Toronto has a lot of wildlife," says Tiziana Gelmi Candusso, postdoctoral researcher in the University of Toronto's department of ecology and evolutionary biology and School of Cities in the Faculty of Arts & Science.," Gelmi Candusso studies how urban mammals select their habitat, how they travel and how different species interact—both through animal–animal and plant–animal interactions.
The team used 33 cameras located throughout the Greater Toronto Area. Many were located along the shore of Lake Ontario east of downtown, the Don River valley and the Humber River valley. Their study looked at images captured between October 2020 to September 2021. That included 2,361 images of foxes and 1,195 of coyotes.
To explain how the underestimations occur, Gelmi Candusso says,"When using predation events to understand predator-prey interactions, we often miss those prey that are hard to distinguish when carried and those that are not carried at all, while potential encounter events will miss species outside our detection range such as mice and voles."
For example, a nearby bird feeder could result in more potential encounter events because the feeder can act as an attractant for both predator and prey; so, too, the camera's proximity to trails which coyotes and foxes seem to prefer traveling through dense undergrowth.
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