This is especially relevant for small terrestrial vertebrate predators, which are difficult to observe without altering their behaviour. Methods for measuring the first two drivers are well developed, however, measuring hunting rates and hunting success can be far more difficult. This variation is largely driven by differences in predator densities, by differences in spatial and temporal behaviours of predators, and by variation in hunting success by predators. The risk of predation on prey can vary across landscapes, ranging from areas of refuge where the impact of predation is low to areas with high predation risk and impact. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.Ĭompeting interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist. The full 98 h of video footage will be available to future researchers upon request.įunding: This research was funded by supporters of the Australian Wildlife Conservancy, the Australian Research Council, and the Western Australian Department of Parks and Wildlife (Kimberley Science and Conservation Strategy). We therefore propose to make a publicly available five-minute video highlighting many of the predation events witnessed, including every bit of footage discussed in the paper (attached as Supplementary Material). The raw video footage is unsuitable for archiving due to its immense size (98 hours long and over 480 GB). This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are creditedĭata Availability: All data used for analysis is available from Dryad (doi: 10.5061/dryad.47jp0). Received: MaAccepted: JPublished: August 19, 2015Ĭopyright: © 2015 McGregor et al. ![]() PLoS ONE 10(8):Įditor: Benjamin Lee Allen, University of Queensland, AUSTRALIA Maintaining complex vegetation cover can reduce predation rates of small prey species from feral cat predation.Ĭitation: McGregor H, Legge S, Jones ME, Johnson CN (2015) Feral Cats Are Better Killers in Open Habitats, Revealed by Animal-Borne Video. This has broad implications for management of vegetation and disturbance processes (like fire and grazing) in areas where feral cats threaten native fauna. This research shows that habitat structure has a profound influence on the impacts of small predators on their prey. Hunting success was highly dependent on microhabitat structure surrounding prey, increasing from 17% in habitats with dense grass or complex rocks to 70% in open areas. ![]() From 89 hours of footage, we recorded 101 hunting events, of which 32 were successful. We attached collar-mounted video cameras to feral cats living in a tropical savanna environment in northern Australia, and measured variation in hunting success among different microhabitats (open areas, dense grass and complex rocks). These effects are poorly understood due to the difficulty of observing actual hunting behaviours. One of the key gaps in understanding the impacts of predation by small mammalian predators on prey is how habitat structure affects the hunting success of small predators, such as feral cats.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |