Raccoon Dogs Adjust Diel Visitation at Scent Marking Latrines to Reduce Human Disturbance in Urban Areas

Human activity and development have a variety of effects on wildlife behavior, often prompting urban wildlife to adopt behavioral strategies-including spatiotemporal activity adjustments-that facilitate persistence in human-dominated environments. In this study, our objective was to determine whether and how visitation behavior of raccoon dogs (Nyctereutes procyonoides) to communal scent marking hubs (i.e., latrines) was influenced by human activity and development in urban green spaces in Tokyo, Japan. Using camera-trap data collected over 4530 trap days, we recorded 3259 latrine visits and assessed temporal patterns of activity at both the green space and individual latrine scales. We found that raccoon dog visitation to latrines was primarily at night in the urban green spaces, but the peak times for visitation at each latrine varied depending on the environmental context of the green space (size and the surrounding environment) and the latrines (the distance from a road). Our findings indicate that while raccoon dogs maintain scent-marking behavior in urban areas, they exhibit behavioral flexibility through adjusting the timing of visitation to minimize disturbance from human activity. Our results underscore the importance of considering the spatiotemporal behavioral adaptations of urban wildlife and highlight the need to preserve accessible and temporally buffered areas for olfactory communication in human-dominated areas.