Individual specialists within a generalist niche: variable diet of stoats and implications for conservation
Conservation programmes aiming to suppress or remove invasive small mammal populations that threaten endemic fauna assume that eliminating an individual predator has the same effect as eliminating a conspecific in terms of decreasing risk to the prey species. However, marked between-individual variation in prey take could, at times, lead to uneven predation pressure. Such variation in the diets of introduced predators has long been hypothesised in New Zealand, suggesting that some observed rates of predation are not typical of the prey population as a whole.