Tag Archives: cat

Cats And Coyotes Divvy Up The Chicago Suburbs

coyoteI’ve been to Chicago and the surrounding area plenty of times, but I never thought to look for coyotes. I hadn’t realized that the animals have been expanding their territory over the last several hundred years, and they can now be found in many U.S. and Canadian cities, including Chicago. In many of these areas, coyotes are now the largest carnivores, at the top of the food web. And that might be affecting some of the animals we are more familiar with.

Urban coyotes have a varied diet, consisting mostly of small rodents, white-tailed deer, fruit (carnivores aren’t strictly meat eaters), bunnies and birds. They also eat a small number of cats, which led a group of scientists who are studying urban coyotes in the Chicago area to look into how coyotes and feral cats interact in the city’s suburbs. The results of their study appear in PLOS ONE.

feralcatBetween February 2008 and September 2009, the researchers captured 43 cats in eight sites in the suburbs west of Chicago. They then took blood samples from the cats and fitted 39 with radiocollars (two cats were thought to be pets, one was too small for the collar, and one was so sick it was euthanized). Getting good data from the cats was difficult: A fifth of the cats died during the study period, a quarter were adopted, 13 percent had collars that didn’t last until the end of the study, 10 percent were never heard from again, and, in what is the most mysterious statement in the study, 23 percent “were removed from the system by cat advocates opposed to our research.” Despite the difficulties, however, the researchers were able to get good tracking data for a number of kitties, enough to map out several cats’ home ranges and plot them against the ranges of coyotes in the urban coyote project.

The cats and coyotes, the researchers found, did overlap a bit in their travels, but for the most part, cats stuck to areas around homes and buildings. The coyotes, in contrast, preferred natural habitats away from human development. “Coyotes in our system appear to inhibit cat use of the natural habitat fragments through a combination of predation and cat avoidance of coyote activity,” the researchers conclude. “It is clear the two species are largely separated across the metropolitan area.”

This is only a small study, but the team speculates that coyotes may be controlling the feral cat population throughout the Chicago area, keeping the cats out of the fragments of natural habitat that dot the suburbs. If the pattern holds in other areas, then in regions where coyotes can be found, the ecological impacts of cats (that is, the cats’ killing of birds and other native wildlife) might be overestimated. Cats have gained a reputation for being evil murderers that devastate wildlife, but we’re finding that the story is far more complicated. And its one that needs to be better elucidated.

Images courtesy of flickr users John Picken (Chicago coyote, top) and cats marcoff (Chicago feral cat, bottom)

September 17, 2013Permalink 1 Comment

The Iberian Lynx Is Doomed — Maybe

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The world’s most endangered cat is not the lion or cheetah or tiger; it’s the Iberian lynx. Already at risk for a number of reasons I’ll get into below, a new study from Nature Climate Change predicts that the lynx could be extinct by 2060, driven off the planet by anthropogenic climate change.

As its name suggests, the Iberian lynx belongs on the Spanish-Portuguese peninsula, where it exists in a few isolated places in southwestern Spain and perhaps Portugal (though no one really knows). The IUCN estimates the lynx population at a mere 84 to 143 adult cats; recent counts suggest there may be as many as 250 of these kitties. Even the high number is a pretty small population — thus, the classification as Critically Endangered.

The lynx’s habitat has shrunk from 15,700 square miles in the 1950s to just 460 square miles, estimated in 2005. Like its North American counterpart, the Iberian lynx depends on rabbit for sustenance, but the cats’ bunny meal, the European rabbit, has gone through a major decline because of disease, hunting, and habitat loss. The lynx have also suffered from people trapping and poaching them, and hitting them with cars. (Generally cars and wild cats do not mix well.)

The good news for the lynx is that they have a lot of fans and conservation efforts have been well funded. There have been captive breeding programs, work towards restoring their bunny prey, and other efforts to make the world more friendly to the Iberian lynx, all in the hope that the cat population can grow larger, or at least not die out.

The problem, say researchers in the new study, is that none of these plans account for climate change. When they created a computer model of the lynx and rabbit populations that included the expected alterations to temperature and precipitation, they discovered that the lynx would die out within the next 50 years.

“Our models show that the anticipated climate change will lead to a rapid and dramatic decline of the Iberian lynx and probably eradicate the species within 50 years, in spite of the present-day conservation efforts. The only two populations currently present will not be able to spread out or adapt to the changes in time,” coauthor Miguel Araújo, an ecologist at the University of Copenhagen, said in a statement.

All hope is not lost yet, though. If policymakers incorporate climate change into their plans for the lynx, the cats can survive, the scientists say. If climate change were considered in the planning of reintroduction efforts, those efforts could result in there being as many as 900 Iberian lynx by 2090.

The establishment of wildlife corridors along climate pathways might also help. The research team cautions, however, that the immediate nature of the threat, high costs of the corridor creation, and the fact that translocating lynx is technically feasible means that it’s probably easier to just move the cats rather than try to get them to move on their own through a corridor.

“The risk of extinction faced by Iberian lynx within the next 50 years is high,” the researchers write. But with good planning, extinction of the lynx might still be avoided.

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Images Credit: Hector Garrido, CSIC Andalusia Audiovisual Bank, via EurekAlert

July 21, 2013Permalink Leave a comment

The Gene That Gives One Breed Of Cat A Curly Coat

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Depending on how cat mad you are, you’ve probably never seen a Selkirk rex kitty, let alone seen or held one. They’re not a popular breed — far less than the Persian (b, in the picture above) or the Scottish fold (c) — but their main feature is a curly coat (a, left). The curly trait is dominant, so about a quarter of any Selkirk rex litter will be the less-wanted straight-hair variety (a, right).

The Selkirk rex is a very new breed, having been developed after a curly-coated (aka rex) mutation arose in a cat in 1987. There have been about 8.4 generations of these kitties, which have been outbred to British shorthairs, exotic shorthairs and Persians to establish the breed (without too much inbreeding).

Though scientists (and breeders) have known that the curly trait is dominant, they hadn’t been able to find the responsible gene. The latest — and successful — attempt comes from a team led by Barbara Gandolfi at the University of California Davis. They published their results in Scientific Reports.

The team looked at the genes of nine curly coated Selkirk rex cats and 29 control kitties, a group that included Persians, British shorthairs and straight-haired Selkirk rex cats. The cats may look different, but they all belong to a big group of related kitties known as the “Persian family.” Gandolfi’s team eventually traced the curly trait to a gene KRT71 — they’re not sure exactly what the gene does, but they know it has something to do with the development of the hair follicle (not exactly surprising).

KRT71 had been ruled out as the curly coat gene in the Selkirk rex in an earlier study that looked at curly-coated cats of several breeds, but it seems that the Selkirk rex in that study was a straight-haired cat, so the researchers would have never been able to find a curly coat gene in it. That study did find, though, that various mutations in KRT71 produced curly hair in the Devon rex breed and the naked look of the sphinx cat.

What else might mutations in this gene produce? Scientists still have a couple more curly-haired breeds to check out — the LaPerm and the American wirehair. Perhaps they’re KRT71 mutants as well.

Photos by Barbara Gandolfi, via Creative Commons license: Gandolfi, B. et al. A splice variant in KRT71 is associated with curly coat phenotype of Selkirk Rex cats. Sci. Rep. 3, 2000; DOI:10.1038/srep02000 (2013).

June 18, 2013Permalink Leave a comment

Dear Nature Lover, My Cat Isn’t Your Problem

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Thousands of years ago, cats and humans struck a deal. We’d give kitties a home as long as they took care of our vermin. The cats don’t always hold up their end of the bargain — my own, for example, has done nothing about my current mouse situation — but humans haven’t done much better. And now we have a huge problem.

A paper published today in Nature Communications documented a kitty kill tally that’s pretty scary. In the U.S., cats kill as many as 3.7 billion birds and 20.7 billion mammals every year. Culturing Science calls them “ruthless killers.”

They’re right, of course. That’s why we inviting cats into our homes.

But a closer look at the study shows that it’s not cats like mine that are the problem. My kitty never goes outside. But even owned cats that go outside aren’t the worst killers. Unowned, feral cats accounted for 89 percent of the mortality.

And the fault with the feral population lies with us humans. People don’t get their pets fixed. They let them roam free or, worse, abandon them. And well-meaning people feed feral cat populations, letting the animals survive and kill more wildlife.

So what’s to be done? It has to start with a serious conversation about how we care for cats. We need to get more people to spay and neuter their animals, and encourage them to not let their animals outside. (Really, house kitties are happy.) And we have to figure out what to do with feral cats. Trap-neuter-release programs appear humane, but it’s having devastating affects on the natural world.

Ideally, I would gather up all the feral kitties in the world, get them fixed, and let them live out their days in huge barns. That’s probably not practical, but at least it’s an idea.

Image credit: Flickr user Janesdead

January 30, 2013Permalink 1 Comment