In the late 1980s, I was studying dwarf mongooses in Tanzania’s Serengeti National Park when an extraordinary thing happened. Understanding how is essential for their conservation. Research that my colleagues with the Zambian Carnivore Programme and I have conducted in Zambia and Tanzania suggests why smaller, subordinate species like wild dogs are better able to move through human-modified landscapes. There may be a silver lining to being the bottom dog in the competitive hierarchy. Weighing in at about 40-62 pounds (18-28 kilograms), wild dogs have been shaped by the necessity to compete with larger species like the lion and spotted hyena. Cooperation with pack mates allows them to hunt prey much larger than themselves. Wild dogs are lanky, long-distance hunters that always live in groups, usually of eight to 10 adults. For several million years, African wild dogs have evolved within a set of large carnivores that all prey on the same large herbivore species, like wildebeest and warthogs. Within these limited areas, they must compete for the same food sources.Ĭompetition is, of course, nothing new. Increasingly, lions, hyenas, and African wild dogs are restricted to protected areas like national parks. Large carnivores in Africa are important from ecological, economic, and cultural perspectives, but human activities put them at risk. This story was originally published on The Conversation and appears here under a Creative Commons license.
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