Introduction Cervical cancer is South Africa’s second most common cancer among women, yet for complex reasons, Papanicolaou screening uptake remains suboptimal. Only a few studies have explored the interplay between sociodemographic characteristics, women’s empowerment, healthcare access, and lifestyle behaviors in influencing screening participation. We examined the associations between cervical cancer screening uptake and so...

Predation risk induces a myriad of behavioral antipredator responses of prey. However, different antipredator behaviors exhibit different degrees of flexibility within a single prey species. Moreover, how predator species composition and traits interact with the flexibility of particular antipredator behaviors to determine spatiotemporal activity patterns of prey remains unknown. We examined geographic variation in multiple be...

Spatial confinement to a home range is theorized to be a more energetically efficient method of acquiring resources than random searching due to spatial memory. Intraspecific studies that have compared home range size at different population densities have found that home ranges shrink as population density increases. This negative trend could be due to increased conspecific competition via population density increase or due t...

Climate warming is causing asynchronies between animal phenology and environments. Mismatched traits, such as coat color change mismatched with snow, can decrease survival. However, coat change does not serve a singular adaptive benefit of camouflage, and alternate coat change functions may confer advantages that supersede mismatch costs. We found that mismatch reduced, rather than increased, autumn mortality risk of snowshoe...

Snowshoe hare cycles are one of the most prominent phenomena in ecology. Experimental studies point to predation as the dominant driving factor, but previous experiments combining food supplementation and predator removal produced unexplained multiplicative effects on density. We examined the potential interactive effects of food limitation and predation in causing hare cycles using an individual‐based food‐supplementation exp...

Food availability and temporal variation in predation risk are both important determinants of the magnitude of antipredator responses, but their effects have rarely been examined simultaneously, particularly in wild prey. Here, we determine how food availability and long‐term predation risk affect antipredator responses to acute predation risk by monitoring the foraging response of free‐ranging snowshoe hares ( Lepus americanu...

In recent years, it has been argued that the effect of predator fear exacts a greater demographic toll on prey populations than the direct killing of prey. However, efforts to quantify the effects of fear have primarily relied on experiments that replace predators with predator cues. Interpretation of these experiments must consider two important caveats: (1) the magnitude of experimenter‐induced predator cues may not be reali...