Density-dependence produces spurious relationships among demographic parameters in a harvested species.

Harvest of wild organisms is an important component of human culture, economy, and recreation, but can also put species at risk of extinction. Decisions that guide successful management actions therefore rely on the ability of researchers to link changes in demographic processes to the anthropogenic actions or environmental changes that underlie variation in demographic parameters. Ecologists often use population models or maximum sustained yield curves to estimate the impacts of harvest on wildlife and fish populations. Applications of these models usually focus exclusively on the impact of harvest and often fail to consider adequately other potential, often collinear, mechanistic drivers of the observed relationships between harvest and demographic rates. In this study, we used an integrated population model and long-term data (1973-2016) to examine the relationships among hunting and natural mortality, the number of hunters, habitat conditions, and population size of blue-winged teal Spatula discors, an abundant North American dabbling duck with a relatively fast-paced life history strategy. Over the last two and a half decades of the study, teal abundance tripled, hunting mortality probability increased slightly (

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© 2022 The Authors. Journal of Animal Ecology published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd on behalf of British Ecological Society.