Just Like Cats and Dogs

THE NEXT TIME YOU WATCH your dog sniff around the same places in your yard or notice your cat explore a new area every time it ventures outside, consider this: You might be witnessing ancient evolutionary strategies in action.

A recent UMD-led study in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that wild canids—wolves, foxes, coyotes and others—consistently create and stick to specific travel routes within their territories. But their distant carnivore cousins in the cat family—like bobcats, lions and leopards—tend to roam more freely, relying less strongly on favored routes.

The study, conducted with 177 collaborators worldwide, used GPS collar data to track the movement of 1,239 individual carnivores from 34 species across six continents over the past decade. The largest-ever comparative study of carnivore movement ecology, the project was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and German science agencies.

“We found that carnivore species use space in fundamentally different ways,” says lead scientist William Fagan, a Distinguished University Professor of biology at UMD. “It looks like these different navigation strategies have developed over millions of years since dogs and cats last shared a common ancestor.”

The findings challenge scientists’ traditional understanding that predators moved randomly throughout their territories, an assumption so widespread that it was baked into standard mathematical models.

However, the new findings show that many carnivores create invisible “highway” systems that they use to move around their home ranges, perhaps thanks in part to dogs’ powerful sense of smell.

“Canids possess superior olfactory abilities compared to felids, potentially helping them establish and remember preferred travel routes,” Fagan says.

The magnitude and consistency of differences between the two predator groups are striking given the large, varied dataset, says senior author Justin M. Calabrese, head of the Earth System Science research group at Center for Advanced Systems Understanding in Germany and an adjunct professor at UMD.

Intriguingly, the differences between canids and felids actually became stronger when the researchers restricted their analyses to nine shared landscapes where they could be studied together, removing the influence of variation in vegetation type, human “footprints” and other factors.

The findings have many implications for improving wildlife conservation and management practices, such as predicting human-wildlife encounters and organizing conservation areas to protect endangered species from threats including poaching, Fagan says.

“The project demonstrated how modern GPS technology and sophisticated analysis methods developed by our research group can reveal fascinating hidden aspects of animal behavior that were impossible to study just a short time ago,” he says.