predators | ConservationBytes.com

Our pets are predators

21 01 2026

Those of us living with cats share our homes with an ancestral predator, one adapted for hunting and the frequent, exclusive consumption of meat. These instincts become fully activated outside the domestic environment, where cats pose a global threat to wildlife.

Pets are family. We celebrate their arrival with the same joy as a grand homecoming, and their absence leaves a grief as deep as losing a loved one. In bonding with cats and dogs, we often attribute human abilities and emotions to them.

But beyond this affection, domestic animals still carry the instincts and genetic legacy of their wild ancestors(1, 2). My cats — Caruso, Muesli, and Plata — have been calm and loving, but they have always enjoyed a real hunt (3). When a moth comes in through a window, they seem possessed: their mouths chitter and make clicking sounds, they leap from one piece of furniture to another, and their heads snap sharply between the insect’s position and other points in the room, calculating the best spot from which to pounce on their prey. That is why when they become feral, cats and dogs integrate into food chains like any other species: they compete for ecosystem resources, hunt and are hunted, and hybridise and exchange diseases with other carnivores (4, 5).

^{Top: cat eating an Eurasian blue tit (Cyanistes caeruleus), a common visitor to home gardens in Nijmegen (Netherlands). Bottom, domestic cat after hunting an Eastern cottontail rabbit (Sylvilagus floridanus) in a residential neighbourhood of Stratford (Connecticut, USA). Photos courtesy of Jelger Herder (Nijmegen) and Scott Kruitbosch (Stratford). Scott is a photographer and conservationist. Near sunset on 30/09/2020, while intently observing local wildlife, he witnessed a neighbourhood cat sneak up from behind on a cottontail feeding in open grass and grab it. For years, Scott has had extremely negative interactions, both in person and online, with local residents over these issues. These exchanges have revealed that many people show little concern for wildlife or for the dangers their outdoor cats face, and believe that their cats would not, or could not, harm wildlife.}

Domestic cats are highly skilled hunters, and their predatory interactions with a wide range of prey are widely documented in social media and documentaries. Some examples include cats catching: bats and birds on the wing, butterflies, chipmunks, dragons, fishes, grasshoppers, frogs, lizards, mice, owls, rabbits, seagulls, snakes, squirrels, and wallabies. See an award-winning photo depicting wildlife with fatal injuries caused by cats recorded in 2019 at a single animal hospital in the USA, and a video showing domestic cats mimicking bird calls and some cat owners explaining that their pets reject commercial cat food after experiencing the thrill of hunting real prey. The documentary Secret Life of Cats contextualises the ecological challenges posed by free-roaming cats.

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Tags: conservation, domestic cat, domestic dog, mammals, pets, predators
Categories : alien species, animal welfare, Australia, behaviour, biodiversity, birds, cat, conservation, conservation biology, decline, disease, ecology, environmental policy, Europe, exploitation, extinction, frog, impact, invasive species, mammal, management, predation, predator, research, threatened species

Influential conservation ecology papers of 2018

17 12 2018

For the last five years I’ve published a retrospective list of the ‘top’ 20 influential papers of the year as assessed by experts in F1000 Prime — so, I’m doing so again for 2018 (interesting side note: six of the twenty papers highlighted here for 2018 appear in Science magazine). See previous years’ posts here: 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, and 2013.

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Tags: biodiversity hotspots, biodiversity loss, climate breakdown, climate change, cognition, coral reefs, disease, fieldwork, Fish, fisheries, fishing impacts, Great Barrier Reef, killer whales, mammals, nuisance species, plastics, predators, productivity, richness-productivity relationship, sharks, Species richness, wild areas
Categories : anthropocene, aquaculture, Australia, biodiversity, biowealth, carbon, climate change, climate shift, community ecology, connectivity, conservation, conservation biology, conservation ecology, coral reefs, decline, deforestation, demography, ecology, economics, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental policy, environmental science, exploitation, extinction, extinction debt, fish, fisheries, food, fragmentation, function, habitat loss, harvest, human overpopulation, invasive species, management, marine, marine protected area, modelling, pollination, pollution

Save a jaguar by eating less meat

8 10 2018

My encounter with Kaayana in Kaa-Iya National Park in the Bolivian Chaco. Her cub was around but cannot be seen in the photo

I was trapped. Or so I thought.

The jaguar came towards me on the dirt road, calmly but attentively in the dusky light, her nearly full grown cub behind her. Nervous and with only a torch as defence, I held the light high above my head as she approached, trying to look taller. But she was merely curious; and, after 20 minutes, they left. I walked home in the thickening darkness, amazed at having come so close to South America’s top predator. We later named this mother jaguar ‘Kaayana’, because she lives inside Kaa-Iya National Park in the Bolivian Chaco. My fascination with jaguars has only grown since then, but the chances of encountering this incredible animal in the wild have shrunk even since that night.

A few years after that encounter, I’m back to study jaguars in the same forest, only now at the scale of the whole South American Gran Chaco. Jaguars are the third largest cats in the world and the top predators across Latin America. This means that they are essential for keeping ecosystems healthy. However, they are disappearing rapidly in parts of their range.

Understanding how and where the jaguar’s main threats — habitat destruction and hunting — affect them is fundamental to set appropriate strategies to save them. These threats are not only damaging on their own, but they sometimes act simultaneously in an area, potentially having impacts that are larger than their simple sum. For instance, a new road doesn’t only promote deforestation, it also increases hunters’ ability to get into previously inaccessible forests. Similarly, when the forest is cut for cattle ranching, ranchers often kill jaguars for fears of stock loss.

Kaayana was seen years later by Daniel Alarcón, who took much better photos of her and her new cubs

However, the interactions between these threats are still not fully understood. In our new study, just published in the journal Diversity and Distributions, we developed a new framework to quantify how and where habitat destruction and hunting risk acted together over three decades, at the expense of highly suitable jaguar habitat in the Gran Chaco. We also analyzed how well the different Chaco countries — Bolivia, Paraguay and Argentina — and their protected areas maintained key jaguar habitat. Read the rest of this entry »

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Tags: Argentina, big cats, Bolivia, Chaco, Felidae, Gran Chaco, habitat loss, human-wildlife conflict, jaguar, Panthera onca, Paraguay, poaching, predators
Categories : agriculture, Amazon, biodiversity, biogeography, cat, conservation, conservation biology, decline, deforestation, development, environmental policy, exploitation, food, habitat loss, harvest, human-wildlife conflict, livestock, mammal, management, poaching, predation, predator, protected area, research, South America, top-down ecology

Influential conservation ecology papers of 2017

27 12 2017

As I have done for the last four years (2016, 2015, 2014, 2013), here’s another retrospective list of the top 20 influential conservation papers of 2017 as assessed by experts in F1000 Prime.

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Tags: Africa, Amazon, biodiversity, boundaries, cats, climate change, decline, depression, disturbance, dogs, drowning, elevation, eutrophication, Fish, forests, fragmentation, Genetics, Global warming, green spaces, insects, mental health, networks, nutrient cycling, ocean, oil, oil spill, oxygen, photosynthesis, phytoplankton, Planetary boundaries, Predation, predators, prey, productivity, rainfall, richness, Soil, wildebeest, zooplankton
Categories : Africa, algae, Amazon, anthropocene, biodiversity, biowealth, cat, climate change, community ecology, connectivity, conservation, conservation ecology, coral reefs, decline, deforestation, drought, ecology, ecosystem, ecosystem function, ecosystem services, environmental science, eutrophication, extinction, extinction debt, fish, fragmentation, function, genetics, habitat loss, marine, pollination, toxicology

Influential conservation papers of 2015

25 12 2015

As I did last year and the year before, here’s another arbitrary, retrospective list of the top 20 influential conservation papers of 2015 as assessed via F1000 Prime.

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Tags: Anthropocene, assemblage, bees, biodiversity, carbon, climate change, coral reefs, decline, deforestation, disease, ecosystem services, ecosystems, extinction, fisheries, forests, grazing, health, IPBES, metapopulation, MPA, neonicotinoids, payments for ecosystem services, pollination, Predation, predators, Protected Areas, resilience, species loss
Categories : conservation

What’s in a name? The dingo’s sorry saga

30 01 2015

The more I delve into the science of predator management, the more I realise that the science itself takes a distant back seat to the politics. It would be naïve to think that the management of dingoes in Australia is any more politically charged than elsewhere, but once you start scratching beneath the surface, you quickly realise that there’s something rotten in Dubbo.

My latest contribution to this saga is a co-authored paper led by Dale Nimmo of Deakin University (along with Simon Watson of La Trobe and Dave Forsyth of Arthur Rylah) that came out just the other day. It was a response to a rather dismissive paper by Matt Hayward and Nicky Marlow claiming that all the accumulated evidence demonstrating that dingoes benefit native biodiversity was somehow incorrect.

Their two arguments were that: (1) dingoes don’t eradicate the main culprits of biodiversity decline in Australia (cats & foxes), so they cannot benefit native species; (2) proxy indices of relative dingo abundance are flawed and not related to actual abundance, so all the previous experiments and surveys are wrong.

Some strong accusations, for sure. Unfortunately, they hold no water at all. Read the rest of this entry »