Natures wonders: cheetah social life (Introduction)

by David Turell , Tuesday, December 08, 2020, 16:21 (1444 days ago) @ David Turell

Males have territories with urine marked trees or stones:

https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/12/male-cheetahs-leave-messages-cat-bars-knowing-t...

"Specific trees and large rocks in Africa are like bars for male cheetahs, new research reveals. The big cats use these places to find mates and send signals to other males, effectively making them communication hubs for their species. They may also be key to saving the animals from angry farmers, the study suggests.

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"Caro’s earlier research served as a starting point for the cheetah study. In the 1980s, he discovered that the big cats have a unique social system among mammals: Solitary females range over huge areas that encompass the smaller territories held by males. Competition among males for their domains is fierce, and they often form coalitions with one or two unrelated males to defend their land. Males without territories (called floaters) roam around looking to take over one of these holdings.

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"Territorial males spent half their time at these trees or rocks, marking them frequently with urine, the team found. Meanwhile, floaters visited the sites regularly, but only stopped by to sniff. Females also occasionally checked in, leaving their mark when in estrus. Each such site was typically found in the center of a male’s territory and functioned “like a popular bar, where you might have a better chance of finding mating partners,” Melzheimer says.

"These hubs were stable over time. Even when new males took over a territory, they used the same scent-marking location as the previous owners.

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"Melzheimer’s team collaborated with 35 farmers who had lost stock to cheetahs. Of these, six had a cheetah communication hub on their land, and well-documented cheetah attacks. Melzheimer thought the information the cheetahs gathered at these sites was so important, the cats would not follow the livestock if farmers moved their animals elsewhere. Although the six farmers were skeptical, they agreed to move their herds with suckling calves to areas away from these hubs. The number of calves subsequently lost to predation by cheetahs decreased by 86% on average, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

"That’s an “astounding” drop, says Maximilian Allen, a carnivore ecologist at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, who was not involved in the study. “It seems these findings can be applied in any areas where cheetahs overlap with agriculture and livestock.”

"Melzheimer concurs. “We’ve discovered there aren’t ‘problem animals,’” he says, but “‘problem areas.’” He adds that “every farmer [in this part of Namibia] who has a communication hub is now implementing our advice,” and that additional farmers in the country are participating in the research."

Comment: Simple animal thought controls the geography. Learning it helps the farmers