Extraterritorial hunting expeditions to intense fire scars by feral cats

Feral cats are normally territorial in Australia’s tropical savannahs, and hunt intensively with home-ranges only two to three kilometres across. Here we report that they also undertake expeditions of up to 12.5 km from their home ranges to hunt for short periods over recently burned areas. Cats are...

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Autores principales: McGregor, Hugh W., Legge, Sarah, Jones, Menna E., Johnson, Christopher N.
Formato: Online Artículo Texto
Lenguaje:English
Publicado: Nature Publishing Group 2016
Materias:
Article
Acceso en línea:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4773836/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26932268
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep22559
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author McGregor, Hugh W.
Legge, Sarah
Jones, Menna E.
Johnson, Christopher N.
author_facet McGregor, Hugh W.
Legge, Sarah
Jones, Menna E.
Johnson, Christopher N.
author_sort McGregor, Hugh W.
collection PubMed
description Feral cats are normally territorial in Australia’s tropical savannahs, and hunt intensively with home-ranges only two to three kilometres across. Here we report that they also undertake expeditions of up to 12.5 km from their home ranges to hunt for short periods over recently burned areas. Cats are especially likely to travel to areas burned at high intensity, probably in response to vulnerability of prey soon after such fires. The movements of journeying cats are highly directed to specific destinations. We argue that the effect of this behaviour is to increase the aggregate impact of cats on vulnerable prey. This has profound implications for conservation, considering the ubiquity of feral cats and global trends of intensified fire regimes.
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spelling pubmed-47738362016-03-09 Extraterritorial hunting expeditions to intense fire scars by feral cats McGregor, Hugh W. Legge, Sarah Jones, Menna E. Johnson, Christopher N. Sci Rep Article Feral cats are normally territorial in Australia’s tropical savannahs, and hunt intensively with home-ranges only two to three kilometres across. Here we report that they also undertake expeditions of up to 12.5 km from their home ranges to hunt for short periods over recently burned areas. Cats are especially likely to travel to areas burned at high intensity, probably in response to vulnerability of prey soon after such fires. The movements of journeying cats are highly directed to specific destinations. We argue that the effect of this behaviour is to increase the aggregate impact of cats on vulnerable prey. This has profound implications for conservation, considering the ubiquity of feral cats and global trends of intensified fire regimes. Nature Publishing Group 2016-03-02 /pmc/articles/PMC4773836/ /pubmed/26932268 http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep22559 Text en Copyright © 2016, Macmillan Publishers Limited http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. The images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in the credit line; if the material is not included under the Creative Commons license, users will need to obtain permission from the license holder to reproduce the material. To view a copy of this license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
spellingShingle Article
McGregor, Hugh W.
Legge, Sarah
Jones, Menna E.
Johnson, Christopher N.
Extraterritorial hunting expeditions to intense fire scars by feral cats
title Extraterritorial hunting expeditions to intense fire scars by feral cats
title_full Extraterritorial hunting expeditions to intense fire scars by feral cats
title_fullStr Extraterritorial hunting expeditions to intense fire scars by feral cats
title_full_unstemmed Extraterritorial hunting expeditions to intense fire scars by feral cats
title_short Extraterritorial hunting expeditions to intense fire scars by feral cats
title_sort extraterritorial hunting expeditions to intense fire scars by feral cats
topic Article
url https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4773836/
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26932268
http://dx.doi.org/10.1038/srep22559
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