Large carnivores like dholes, leopards and tigers, which compete for the same food resources, use several tactics to avoid each other while still co-occuring in the same spaces. Understanding the nuances of their interactions has been of interest to ecologists for a long time. What happens when formidable large carnivores encounter each other? Who wins or who loses? Do they kill each other? Does the availability of prey alter these equations? These interactions, beyond enabling the coexistence of the carnivores … Read More
Old Dog, New Tricks: Methods to Count Dhole Numbers
The fundamental metric that we need for assessing and monitoring the status of threatened or endangered species is the population size, i.e., we are typically interested in finding out how many individuals of a species currently exist. Unfortunately, estimating these numbers is a daunting task because most endangered animals– especially those that live in dense tropical forests– are rare, secretive and elusive. For animals that have individual markings (like the stripes of a tiger, spots of a cheetah, rosettes of … Read More
Human-leopard Interactions in Rajasthan
Understanding the ecology of large carnivores and their interactions with people across large areas such as landscapes, regions, or entire states, is extremely important yet logistically infeasible. Newspaper reports that regularly document information about wild animals (like bears, leopards, and elephants) that frequently interact with people can be useful sources of information to undertake research on human-wildlife interactions. In a new study, scientists from the Forest Research Institute (Dehradun), Wildlife Conservation Society–India (Bangalore) and the University of Florida (USA) used … Read More
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