Spatial overlap in a solitary carnivore: support for the land tenure, kinship or resource dispersion hypotheses?
Elbroch LM, Lendrum PE, Quigley H, Caragiulo A. 2015. Spatial overlap in a solitary carnivore: support for the land tenure, kinship or resource dispersion hypotheses?. Journal of Animal Ecology. 85
There are several alternative hypotheses about the effects of territoriality, kinship and prey availability on individual carnivore distributions within populations. The first is the landtenure hypothesis, which predicts that carnivores regulate their density through territoriality and temporal avoidance. The second is the kinship hypothesis, which predicts related individuals will be clumped within populations, and the third is the resource dispersion hypothesis, which suggests that resource richness may explain variable sociality, spatial overlap or temporary aggregations of conspecifics. Research on the socio-spatial organization of animals is essential in understanding territoriality, intra- and interspecific competition, and contact rates that influence diverse ecology, including disease transmission between conspecifics and courtship behaviours. We explored these hypotheses with data collected on a solitary carnivore, the cougar (Puma concolor), from 2005 to 2012 in the Southern Yellowstone Ecosystem, Wyoming, USA. We employed 27 annual home ranges for 13 cougars to test whether home range overlap was better explained by land tenure, kinship, resource dispersion or some combination of the three.
- Type
- Journal Article
- Authors
- Elbroch, L.; Lendrum, Patrick; Quigley, Howard; Caragiulo, Anthony
- Units
- GRYN
- Keywords
- home range, migratory prey, spatial organization, territoriality