Camera trap images help wildlife managers ID problem tigers in India

Researchers with WCS and other partners in India are camera traps to ID individual tigers in conflict and relocate them out of harm's way for the benefit of both tigers and people. Credit: WCS

Researchers with the Wildlife Conservation Society and other partners in India are using high-tech solutions to zero in on individual tigers in conflict and relocate them out of harm's way for the benefit of both tigers and people.

In recent tiger-conflict cases involving both a human fatality and the predation of livestock, both occurring near two of India's national parks, WCS scientists helped to identify problem tigers using stripe pattern-matching software and additional information to make the connections. Both tigers have been captured and relocated to a nearby zoo.

Reducing human-wildlife conflict while promoting human welfare and conservation in important wildlife habitats is one of many topics under discussion of the World Parks Congress, a once-in-a-decade event focusing on the management and expansion of the world's protected area networks and the wildlife they contain. The congress, which took place in Sydney, Australia concluded today.

A new paper titled "Photographic Database Informs Management of Conflict Tigers" appears in the latest version of the journal Oryx. The authors are: Ullas Karanth, N. Samba Kumar, and Divya Vasudev of WCS's India Program.

"The vast majority of tigers generally avoid humans and focus only on natural prey species," said Dr. Ullas Karanth, WCS's Director for Science-Asia and lead author on the paper. 

"Using scientific methods to locate individuals involved in conflict with humans and livestock helps us to mitigate threats to people and prevent the capture of the wrong tigers, especially wherever tigers may venture beyond protected area borders."

While tigers struggle to survive in other landscapes across their range through Asia, the big cats in the Malenad Tiger Landscape of southwest India have thrived, becoming one of the largest tiger populations in the world with an estimated 400 animals.

Part of this conservation success has been due to a WCS research program focused on the identification of individual tigers. The system uses unique stripe patterns to identify and track individual animals, and software programs have greatly improved the speed and accuracy of the process. Since the initiation of the research protocol, more than 750 tigers have been identified from six protected areas in the Malanad Tiger Landscape in the Western Ghats across India. The system also enables researchers to keep track of other data such as home range locations, age and ex of individual animals, activity patterns. Over the longer term it even enables estimation of survival and recruitment rates and changes in numbers, all of which can be used to inform management decisions on wild tigers.

The tiger database has become a key factor in finding and capturing problem tigers. One of the recently captured animals was involved in the loss of human life near Bandipur National Park in late December of 2013. Scientists managed to get pictures of the animal from camera traps set up near the area of conflict and discovered a match with an animal photographed over a 5-year period and probably past its prime. Old tigers unable to catch natural prey animals can sometimes resort to hunting livestock, bringing them in conflict with people.

Another tiger, involved in the killing of cattle in a village next to Nagarahole National Park, was by contrast a 2-3 year old youngster some 35 kilometers from locations in which it was previously photographed. Scientists concluded this young tiger was likely searching for a territory, beyond protected areas.

Once ranging across Asia from Turkey to Indonesia, the tiger has been decimated by a combination of habitat destruction, overhunting of prey animal, poaching for the illegal trade and retaliatory killing by humans. The total wild population has been reduced in numbers from perhaps 100,000 at the turn of the 20th Century to a current estimate of fewer than 3,500 animals remaining in only 6 percent of the species' historic range.

Source: Wildlife Conservation Society

Cats and humans have shared the same households for at least 9,000 years, but we still know very little about how our feline friends became domesticated.

The scientists fitted GPS collars and motion sensors on 38 free-ranging lynx for the study. Credit: Image courtesy of Albert-Ludwigs-Universität Freiburg

An international research team recorded and analyzed the activity patterns of 38 wild cats over the course of months Whether a lynx hunts by day or by night and how active it is overall depend primarily on the behavior of the wild cat's most important prey and its individual traits -- lighting conditions, on the other hand, do not play a major role in its basic behavioral patterns. This is the key finding of a study published in the journal PLOS ONE by an international research team led by forest scientist Dr. Marco Heurich.

The scientists fitted GPS collars and motion sensors on 38 free-ranging lynx for the study. Since the study sites were located across a wide latitudinal range from Central Europe to northern Scandinavia, the length of days and nights varied greatly between them. The team recorded and analyzed the activity patterns of the wild cats on a total of more than 11,000 days. The results reveal that lynx in more southerly regions are most active at dawn and dusk and that they move more by night than by day. They take their longest break in the middle of the day, and this break is extended as daylight duration increases. However, the cats exhibit this basic behavioral pattern independently of lighting conditions: "Lynx keep to a 24-hour rhythm with an active and a resting phase even on the polar day and the polar night," reports Heurich.

What the study found to be more important for explaining the wild cats' activity patterns are their individual traits: Young lynx are more active than adult lynx, and male adults are more active than female adults. In addition, they move more in spring and summer than in fall and winter, and the farther north they live, the larger the territory they cover -- and this of course results in higher activity. Lynx adapt their hunting schedule to the behavior of their prey. In polar regions, the height of their activity at dusk is less pronounced. 

This corresponds to the behavioral pattern of reindeer, which exhibit a steady movement profile outside of their sleeping phases.. In Central Europe, by contrast, the team found a maximum amount of activity at dusk -- in lynx as well as in deer. "The findings of this study make an important contribution to our understanding of the habits of predatory animals in our landscape," says Heurich. "They also show that human activities in the areas included in the study do not have a general influence on the activity pattern of the animals."

Cat genome reveals clues to domestication​​

Cats and humans have shared the same households for at least 9,000 years, but we still know very little about how our feline friends became domesticated.

Cats and humans have shared the same households for at least 9,000 years, but we still know very little about how our feline friends became domesticated. An analysis of the cat genome led by researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis reveals some surprising clues.

The research appears Nov. 10 in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences Early Edition.

Cats have a relatively recent history of domestication compared with dogs; canines arose from wolves over 30,000 years ago.

"Cats, unlike dogs, are really only semidomesticated," said senior author Wes Warren, PhD, associate professor of genetics at The Genome Institute at Washington University​. "They only recently split off from wild cats, and some even still breed with their wild relatives. So we were surprised to find DNA evidence of their domestication."

One way scientists can understand the genetics of domestication is to look at what parts of the genome are altered in response to living together with humans, Warren added.
The researchers compared the genomes of domestic cats and wild cats, finding specific regions of the domestic cat genome that differed significantly.

The scientists found changes in the domestic cat's genes that other studies have shown are involved in behaviors such as memory, fear and reward-seeking. These types of behaviors -- particularly those when an animal seeks a reward -- generally are thought to be important in the domestication process.

"Humans most likely welcomed cats because they controlled rodents that consumed their grain harvests," said Warren. "We hypothesized that humans would offer cats food as a reward to stick around."

This meant that certain cats that would normally prefer to lead solitary lives in the wild had an additional incentive to stay with humans. Over time, humans preferred to keep cats that were more docile.

Cat genome project

The cat genome sequencing project, funded by the National Human Genome Research Institute, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH), began in 2007. The project's initial goal was to study hereditary diseases in domestic cats, which are similar in some cases to those that afflict humans, including neurological disorders, and infectious and metabolic diseases.

To obtain the high-quality reference genome needed for this research, the team sequenced a domestic female Abyssinian cat named Cinnamon. They chose this particular cat because they could trace its lineage back several generations. This cat's family also had a particular degenerative eye disorder the researchers wanted to study.

To better understand characteristics of domestication, the researchers sequenced the genomes of select purebred domestic cats. Hallmarks of their domestication include features such as hair color, texture and patterns, as well as facial structure and how docile a cat is. Cats are bred for many of these types of characteristics. In fact, most modern breeds are the result of humans breeding cats for their favorite hair patterns.

The team also looked at a breed called Birman, which has characteristic white paws. The researchers traced the white pattern to just two small changes in a gene associated with hair color. They found that this genetic signature appears in all Birmans, likely showing that humans selectively bred these cats for their white paws and that the change to their genome happened in a remarkably short period of time.

The group also compared the cat genome with those of other mammals -- including a tiger, cow, dog and human -- to understand more about the genetics of cat biology.

"We looked at the underlying genetics to understand why certain abilities to survive in the wild evolved in cats and other carnivores," said Michael Montague, PhD, the study's first author and a postdoctoral research associate at The Genome Institute.

The differences they found in the cat genome help explain characteristics such as why cats are almost exclusively carnivorous and how their vision and sense of smell differ from other animals like dogs.

Solitary carnivores

To digest their fatty, meat-heavy meals, cats need genes to efficiently break down fats. The team found particular fat-metabolizing genes in carnivores such as cats and tigers that changed faster than can be explained by chance. This more rapid change generally means these genes provide some sort of digestive advantage to carnivores that only consume animal proteins. The researchers did not find such changes in the same genes of the cow and human, who eat more varied diets and would not need such enhancements.

Cats also rely less on smell to hunt than dogs. So it is not surprising that the researchers found fewer genes for smell in cats than dogs. But they did find more genes related to an alternate form of smell that detects chemicals called pheromones, which allow cats to monitor their social environment, including seeking out the opposite sex. This ability is not as important to dogs, which tend to travel in packs. But it is crucial in cats, which are more solitary and may have more difficulty finding mates.

Cats also have better hearing than most other carnivores, including an ability to hear in the ultrasonic range to better track prey. Their vision is also exceptional in low light.

"Cats tend to be more active at dawn and dusk," said Montague, "so they need to be able to detect movement in low light." Accordingly, the team identified specific genes that likely evolved to expand cats' hearing range and their vision in low light.

Even though the genomes of domestic cats have changed little since their split from wild cats, the new work shows that it is still possible to see evidence of the species' more recent domestication. "Using advanced genome sequencing technology, we were able to shed light on the genetic signatures of cats' unique biology and survival skills," said Warren. "And we were able to significantly jump start our knowledge about the evolution of cat domestication."

Collaborators in the research include Texas A&M University; University of Missouri-Columbia; University of California-Davis; Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the United Kingdom; Pompeu Fabra University in Spain; Centro de Analisis Genomico in Spain; Bilkent University in Turkey; Indiana Univeristy; Center for Cancer Research in Maryland; St. Petersburg State University in Russia; and Nova Southeastern University in Florida.

Source: Washington University in St. Louis

Predicting the predator threatening a squirrel by analyzing its sounds and tail movements

Thaddeus McRae poses in the Gifford Arboretum with his remote-controlled cat, after being interviewed by WSVN. Credit: University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences

Everyone has watched squirrels playfully climbing trees, gracefully leaping from branch to branch, and scurrying across parks. Thaddeus McRae, Ph.D '12, adjunct assistant research professor of biology in the University of Miami College of Arts Sciences, has taken these observations to a scientific level.

McRae studied squirrel colonies on the Coral Gables campus to see how their sounds and tail movements differ in response to different kinds of threats. He is looking to discover why squirrels interact using both vocalizations and gestures.

"These multimodal signals, which simultaneously send information via two or more sensory modalities to communicate, are ubiquitous," McRae said, adding that people and other mammals, birds, insects and spiders -- and even some plants -- communicate in this manner.

The different sounds, expressions and gestures might "reinforce each other, or maybe they contain different information, or maybe they reach different audiences," he said.

To conduct his research -- the basis of his Ph.D. dissertation -- McRae designed a unique tool: a remote-controlled cat, which he used to chase squirrels while recording their reactions to ground-based predators. Gliders painted to resemble hawks showed the squirrels' responses to threats from the air.

McRae has become somewhat of a local celebrity scientist, with recent and upcoming stories about his study appearing on the Miami New Times "Riptide" blog, and WSVN. He sees three reasons for this media attention.

Squirrels "are often most abundant in the same places people are most abundant," McRae said, adding that they're "cute and fuzzy with a bushy tail, which for some people goes a long way toward earning goodwill."

He also conducted his research in a "very public setting, outdoors on UM's campus in the middle of the city." McRae believes that this helps to breakdown the "mysterious aura" of science, "putting scientific curiosity out there where passersby can see it and become curious themselves."

Finally, he admits that "there's something a little bit humorous" about his research process and his unusual tools.

"To me, this squirrel study isn't cool because I used remote control cats, although enjoying whatever tools you use is nice, it's cool because we learned something about squirrels that we didn't know before," McRae said.

Over two years of observation McRae, working closely with Professor of Biology Steven Green, found that he could quite accurately predict what type of predator was threatening a squirrel by analyzing its sounds and tail movements.

He measured the response of three distinct squirrel sounds: the "kuk" (a short bark), the "quaa" (a longer squeal) and the "moan" (a whistling sound).

He also looked for specific patterns for tail motions in combination with these noises. The "twitch" involves a controlled movement in an arc shape, while the "flag" can take the shape of an arc, figure eight, circle or squiggle.

McRae theorizes that the squirrels use the vocal and tail alarm calls for two purposes -- to let predators know that they have been spotted, and to warn other squirrels of danger in the area. To this end, he is now conducting follow-up research to determine how squirrels react to distress signals from their peers.

For both his current study and his dissertation research, McRae has worked extensively with undergraduate research assistants.

"I try to give them a taste of various steps in the process, from thinking about the organisms and asking questions, to collecting data, to the sometimes tedious task of converting those data into analyzable form, to drawing conclusions. I share with them the joy of discovery," he said.

"Even a small, fast research project can show us something we never knew before. It may not shake the earth, but it's another tiny piece of understanding. ... For a young student to be one of the first handful of people on Earth to share even a small discovery is, frankly, freaking awesome."

Source: University of Miami

Study of mountain lion energetics shows the power of the pounce

The SMART wildlife collar is equipped with GPS, accelerometers, and a magnetometer to provide detailed data on where the animal is and what it is doing.

Scientists at UC Santa Cruz, using a new wildlife tracking collar they developed, were able to continuously monitor the movements of mountain lions in the wild and determine how much energy the big cats use to stalk, pounce, and overpower their prey.

The research team's findings, published October 3 in Science, help explain why most cats use a "stalk and pounce" hunting strategy. The new "SMART" wildlife collar--equipped with GPS, accelerometers, and other high-tech features--tells researchers not just where an animal is but what it is doing and how much its activities "cost" in terms of energy expenditure.

"What's really exciting is that we can now say, here's the cost of being a mountain lion in the wild and what they need in terms of calories to live in this environment," said first author Terrie Williams, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UC Santa Cruz. "Understanding the energetics of wild animals moving in complex environments is valuable information for developing better wildlife management plans."

The researchers were able to quantify, for example, the high energetic costs of traveling over rugged terrain compared to the low cost of "cryptic" hunting behaviors such as sit-and-wait or stalk-and-ambush movements. During the actual pounce and kill, the cats invest a lot of energy in a short time to overpower their prey. Data from the collars showed that mountain lions adjust the amount of energy they put into the initial pounce to account for the size of their prey.

"They know how big a pounce they need to bring down prey that are much bigger than themselves, like a full-grown buck, and they'll use a much smaller pounce for a fawn," Williams said.

Cats on treadmills

Before Williams and her team could interpret the data from collars deployed on wild mountain lions, however, they first had to perform calibration studies with mountain lions in captivity. This meant, among other things, training mountain lions to walk and run on a treadmill and measuring their oxygen consumption at different activity levels. Those studies took a bit longer than planned.

"People just didn't believe you could get a mountain lion on a treadmill, and it took me three years to find a facility that was willing to try," Williams said.

Finally, she met Lisa Wolfe, a veterinarian with Colorado Parks and Wildlife, who had three captive mountain lions (siblings whose mother had been killed by a hunter) at a research facility near Fort Collins, Colorado. After eight months of training by Wolfe, the mountain lions were comfortable on the treadmill and Williams started collecting data.

Power animals

According to Williams, the treadmill data showed that mountain lions do not have the aerobic capacity for sustained, high-energy activity. "They are power animals. They have a slow routine walking speed and use a burst of speed and the force of the pounce to knock down or overpower their prey," she said.

In addition to the treadmill studies, the captive cats were videotaped wearing the collars while doing a wide range of activities in a large outdoor enclosure. This provided a library of collar acceleration signatures specific for different behaviors, from resting and grooming to running and pouncing. "We got all the different behaviors videotaped and analyzed with the corresponding accelerometer traces," Williams said.

Meanwhile, coauthor Chris Wilmers led a team that deployed the collars on wild cats in the Santa Cruz mountains. Wilmers, an associate professor of environmental studies at UC Santa Cruz, leads the Santa Cruz Puma Project, which has been tracking mountain lions in the area to study the effects of habitat fragmentation and developing new technology for understanding the animals' behavior and energetics.

"Because mountain lions are a cryptic animal, we can't really observe them hunting and killing prey. With the SMART collars, we can see how they go about doing that, what their strategies are, and how many calories they are expending to do it," Wilmers said. "The ability to estimate the field energetics of animals in the wild opens up a whole new suite of questions we can ask about the ecology of these animals, which ultimately informs not only our basic understanding of them but also their conservation and management."

State-of-the-art collars

Coauthor Gabriel Elkaim, professor of computer engineering at UCSC's Baskin School of Engineering, worked on signal processing of the accelerometer data and is continuing to develop the state-of-the-art tracking collars. The prototype used in this study, called the Species Movement, Acceleration, and Radio Tracking (SMART) wildlife collar, was developed by computer engineering graduate student Matthew Rutishauser. The collars include a GPS unit, accelerometers, and a magnetometer to provide detailed data on where an animal is and what it is doing. "We hope this will be an enabling technology to allow a much greater depth of understanding of animals in the wild," Elkaim said.

The researchers now want to look at mountain lion energetics in a range of different habitat types. In particular, Wilmers said, he is interested in how human land use and habitat fragmentation may be influencing the energetic demands on mountain lions in the wild. Williams and her students also have projects using the new collar technology to study other large carnivores, including wolves, polar bears, and Weddell seals.

"A lot of these large carnivore species are threatened or endangered, and understanding their physiological limitations has been a big missing piece in conservation planning," Williams said. "This technology gives us a whole new level understanding of what these animals are doing and what it costs them to live in the wild, and that can really help move the science of conservation forward."

In addition to Williams, Wilmers, Wolfe, and Elkaim, the coauthors of the paper include Tracy Davis at Colorado Parks and Wildlife; program manager Traci Kendall and head trainer Beau Richter in Williams's lab at UC Santa Cruz; and UCSC graduate students Yiwei Wang and Caleb Bryce. This research was funded by the National Science Foundation.

Source: University of California - Santa Cruz