'How big cats and wild dogs coexist in India's mountains.'

Discuss other canids (coyotes, foxes, dholes, etc.).

Moderators: Frodo1, Koa

Post Reply
User avatar
duskypack
Former User of the Month
Former User of the Month
Posts: 1383
Joined: Mon Aug 29, 2011 4:49 pm
Name: “Dusk”
Gender: Female

'How big cats and wild dogs coexist in India's mountains.'

Post by duskypack » Fri Mar 03, 2017 6:26 pm

Their domesticated relatives may clash, but India's big cats and wilds dogs get along surprisingly well.

Leopards, tigers and dholes (Asian wild dogs) all compete for the same resources in India's Western Ghat region, yet a new study using camera traps shows that the three carnivores coexist with little conflict. Their solution? The predators have seemingly adapted to life in the relatively small reserves of the Western Ghats region by hunting at different times or in different areas, the researchers said.

While the success of these tactics is reliant on the density of prey and overall health of the habitat, lead author Ullas Karanth, the director for Science in Asia at the Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), said conservationists can learn from the predators' adaptive strategies.

"Tigers, leopards and dholes are doing a delicate dance in these protected areas, and all are manging to survive," Karanth said in a statement. "We were surprised to see how each species has remarkably different adaptations to prey on different prey sizes, use different habitat types and be active at different times."

Both tigers and dholes are classified as "endangered" by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) — meaning the animals are at a high risk of extinction in the wild. The IUCN lists leopards as "vulnerable," or at a high risk of endangerment in the wild.

The researchers tracked the three predators using dozens of noninvasive camera traps, which recorded about 2,500 images of the animals in action. Through analyzing these images, the study authors found that reserves teeming with more prey saw very little overlap in hunting times. The dholes, which hunt during the day, had hardly any contact with nocturnal-hunting tigers and leopards.

However, when prey was scarcer the three species' hunting activity did overlap. Even then, the images showed that the dholes avoided the big cats. Similarly, in an area abundant with both predator and prey, the leopards actively avoided tigers.

The study offers new insights on the behavioral adaptability of the three species, according to the researchers, and can help researchers understand how competing predators can coexist as their habitats continue to shrink.

"Such findings not only advance general scientific understanding of animal community ecology in general, but also provide basic knowledge that must necessarily underpin any effective endangered species recovery program," the study authors wrote online on Feb. 8 in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B: Biological Sciences.

Original article on Live Science.
Rather different from how their wolf cousins deal with rival predators. It makes a lot of sense, though, since dholes seem a lot more tolerant and less territorial from what I know.
¯~_°. .°_~¯
Night is now falling, so ends this day.
The road is now calling, and I must away.
Over hill and under tree, through lands where never light has shone.
By silver streams that run down to the sea.
¯~_°. .°_~¯

Lyrics - The Last Goodbye by Billy Boyd
Av/Sig - Koa/Raven

Owls are Cool
Guest
Guest

Re: 'How big cats and wild dogs coexist in India's mountains

Post by Owls are Cool » Sun Mar 05, 2017 10:16 am

Pretty interesting to read. Thanks for posting!

Post Reply