Kira A Cassidy

• MS
• Research Associate at Yellowstone Forever, non-profit organization

Understanding the population dynamics of top‐predators is essential to assess their impact on ecosystems and to guide their management. Key to this understanding is identifying the mechanisms regulating vital rates. Determining the influence of density on survival is necessary to understand the extent to which human‐caused mortality is compensatory...

Knowledge of characteristics that promote group success during intraspecific encounters is key to understanding the adaptive advantages of sociality for many group-living species. In addition, some individuals in a group may be more likely than others to influence intergroup conflicts, a relatively neglected idea in research on social animals. Here...

For group-living mammals, social coordination increases success in everything from hunting and foraging (Crofoot and Wrangham in Mind the Gap, Springer, Berlin, 2010; Bailey et al. in Behav Ecol Sociobiol 67:1–17, 2013) to agonism (Mosser and Packer in Anim Behav 78:359–370, 2009; Wilson et al. in Anim Behav 83:277–291, 2012; Cassidy et al. in Beha...

When Rudyard Kipling wrote The Jungle Book in 1894 and included the famous line "For the strength of the Wolf is the Pack, and the strength of the Pack is the Wolf," he would have had no idea that over a century later, scientific research would back up his poetic phrase. Recent studies in Yellowstone have found that both the individual wolf and the...

Large carnivores are globally threatened due to habitat fragmentation and loss, prey depletion and human exploitation. Human exploitation includes both legal and illegal hunting and trapping. Protected areas can create refugia from hunting and trapping; however, hunting can still threaten wide‐ranging large carnivores when they leave these areas. L...

The mammalian mouth is colonized by complex microbial communities, adapted to specific niches, and in homeostasis with the host. Individual microbes interact metabolically and rely primarily on nutrients provided by the host, with which they have potentially co-evolved along the mammalian lineages. The oral environment is similar across mammals, bu...

For species of management concern, accurate estimates of inbreeding and associated consequences on reproduction are crucial for predicting their future viability. However, few studies have partitioned this aspect of genetic viability with respect to reproduction in a group-living social mammal. We investigated the contributions of foundation stock...

Transboundary movement of wildlife results in some of the most complicated and unresolved wildlife management issues across the globe. Depending on the location and managing agency, gray wolf (Canis lupus) management in the US ranges from preservation to limited hunting to population reduction. Most wildlife studies focus on population size and gro...

Gray Wolves (Canis lupus) are territorial, group living carnivores that live in packs typically consisting of a dominant breeding pair and their offspring. Breeding tenures are relatively short and competitive, with vacancies usually occurring following a breeder’s death, and are often filled by unrelated immigrants or by relatives of the previous...

Toxoplasma gondii is a protozoan parasite capable of infecting any warm-blooded species and can increase risk-taking in intermediate hosts. Despite extensive laboratory research on the effects of T. gondii infection on behaviour, little is understood about the effects of toxoplasmosis on wild intermediate host behavior. Yellowstone National Park, W...

Validation of agent-based models is underappreciated in scientific studies even though this process is an important part of ensuring that a model is a reliable research tool. Here we propose modifications to a model validation framework and illustrate this framework with a case study of territorial behavior. In species that defend territories, larg...

Cooperatively breeding species exhibit numerous strategies to avoid mating with close relatives, inherently reducing effective population size. For species of management concern, accurate estimates of inbreeding and trait depression are crucial for the species's future. We utilized genomic and pedigree data for Yellowstone National Park gray wolves...

Gray Wolves (Canis lupus) are territorial, group living carnivores that live in packs typically consisting of a dominant breeding pair and their offspring. Breeding tenures are relatively short and competitive, with vacancies usually occurring following a breeder’s death, and are often filled by unrelated immigrants or by relatives of the previous...

The host-associated microbiome is an important player in the ecology and evolution of species. Despite growing interest in the medical, veterinary, and conservation communities, there remain numerous questions about the primary factors underlying microbiota, particularly in wildlife. We bridged this knowledge gap by leveraging microbial, genetic, a...

Imperfect detection is ubiquitous among wildlife research and is therefore commonly included in abundance estimation. Yet, the factors that affect observation success are largely unknown for rare and elusive species, such as large carnivores. Here, we took advantage of intensive ground‐based monitoring effort and an extensive GPS data set (2000–201...

Aggression is a quantitative trait deeply entwined with individual fitness. Mapping the genomic architecture underlying such traits is complicated by complex inheritance patterns, social structure, pedigree information and gene pleiotropy. Here, we leveraged the pedigree of a reintroduced population of grey wolves (Canis lupus) in Yellowstone Natio...

The desire to see free ranging large carnivores in their natural habitat is a driver of tourism in protected areas around the globe. However, large carnivores are wide-ranging and subject to human-caused mortality outside protected area boundaries. The impact of harvest (trapping or hunting) on wildlife viewing opportunities has been the subject of...

Recording Wildlife Sightings in Denali National Park and Preserve. (DOCX)

Wolves in road packs and the probability of wolf sightings along the Denali Park Road, Alaska, USA. Cumulative count of wolves in road packs in the eastern region of Denali National Park and Preserve (grey bars) and the probability of wolf sightings along the Denali Park Road (black triangles) from 1997 to 2012. Shading indicates years with a harve...

Annual probability of sighting index for Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska, USA. Sample size (in number of trips), number of trips with wolf sightings, and annual probability of sighting index for wolves along the Denali Park Road from 1997 to 2013. (DOCX)

Summary of wolf harvest for wolf packs in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA. Population size estimates, number of collared wolves, number of collared breeding wolves, and their proportions in the population and harvest included. Population size and number of collared wolves were pre-hunt numbers. (DOCX)

Model selection table evaluating factors potentially affecting probability of wolf sightings in Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska, USA (including the factor RoadPop). Candidate model set includes the factor RoadPop. K is the number of parameters in the model, PNRI is the Pack Near Road Index, TotalPop is the wolf population size, RoadPop is...

Wolves in road packs and the probability of wolf sightings in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA. Cumulative count of wolves in road packs in the Northern Range of Yellowstone National Park (grey bars) and probability of wolf sightings in Little America and Lamar Valley (black triangles) from 2008–2012. Hashed bars indicate years preceded by h...

Annual probability of sighting index for Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA. Sample size (in number of days within the observation period), number of days with wolf sightings, relative effort for each year (calculated as hours of effort in the given year divided by the maximum number of hours in the field from sampled years), and annual probab...

Summary of wolf harvest for Northern Range packs (including Mollie’s pack) in Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming, USA. Population size estimates, number of collared wolves, number of collared breeding wolves, and their proportions in the population and harvest for Northern Range packs (including Mollie’s pack) included. Population size, number of c...

Summary of wolf harvest for the Eastern Region of Denali National Park and Preserve, Alaska, USA. Population size estimates, number of collared wolves, number of collared breeding wolves, and their proportions in the population and harvest included. Population size, number of collared wolves, and number of collared breeders were pre-hunt numbers. (...

Evidence for territoriality is usually correlative or post hoc as we observe the results of past selection that are challenging to detect. Wolves (Canis lupus) are considered territorial because of competition for food (resource defense), yet they exhibit classic intrinsic behaviors of social regulation (protection against infanticide). This emphas...