Male squirrels pay price for risky behavior

[AGDLynn]

http://www.ajc.com/living/content/li...squirrels.html

Front page of Atlanta paper!

By BILL HENDRICK
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution

It's not just men who die younger than women because they're driven by nature to look for dates and mates.

Add male squirrels to the list, according to new research by Dr. Roel Lopez, a wildlife expert at Texas A & M University, who's just finished a yearlong study of the critters that sometimes dart out in front of your car as if they have a suicide wish. He found that female fox squirrels are much more likely to avoid the pitfalls that males fall into.

"First-year survival was 80 percent for females and 74 percent for males," Lopez said. "And, interestingly, we found that highway mortality accounted for 100 percent of the male squirrel mortality."

Why? Male squirrels travel farther than females, as do human males, increasing their risk of winding up as road kill, Lopez explained. Most of the females that died were killed by predators.

In the study, the animals were trapped, radio-tagged and monitored. Lopez said the research is important because it's the first of its kind on how urban sprawl affects animals.

"This is true for a lot of species," he said. "Males seem to have a higher mortality rate. Breeding behavior puts them more at risk. Squirrels move greater distances, have larger home ranges. That's also true of deer. For every three deer killed by cars, two are males."

Males take chances that females often don't, Lopez said, and that goes for both humans and squirrels.

"Are males dumber? No, they are just not as careful. That's true for many species."