This study demonstrates that plasticity in predator behaviour depending on life stage may tackle a trade-off between successful predation and avoiding the risks associated with conspecifics, human presence and maintaining home range. Resident leopards adopt an energetically more costly mobile behaviour for most of their time while non-residents shift their behavioural states from high energetic expenditure states to energetically less costly encamped behaviour for most of their time, which is likely to be a risk avoidance strategy against conspecifics or humans. Although environmental covariates (ambient temperature and diel period) and ecological outcomes (predation) affected behavioural states in non-resident leopards, the response in resident leopards was not clear, except that temporal patterns were consistent with a crepuscular and nocturnal movement pattern. Multistate modeling provided strong evidence for an effect of life stage on the behavioural states and their associated time budget. We applied this method to GPS relocation data of a caching predator, Persian leopard Panthera pardus saxicolor in northeastern Iran. The latter - defined as the period following a kill which likely involves the caching of uneaten prey - was subsequently confirmed by field inspections. We also decomposed the activity budgets of different movement states at two general and caching phases.
Iran gps tracks drivers#
Using hidden Markov models of individual movement from animal location, biotelemetry, and environmental data, we explored multistate behaviour and the effect of associated intrinsic and extrinsic drivers across life stages. Yet importantly, the ontogeny of underlying (unobservable) behavioural states revealed by the HMMs has rarely been verified in the field. State-space modeling is useful for analysing movement trajectories, particularly with hidden Markov models (HMM). Tackling behavioural questions often requires identifying points in space and time where animals make decisions and linking these to environmental variables.
Two leopards crossed international borders and wandered into Turkmenistan, revealing that two countries may share connected leopard population across With the exception of a young, possibly dispersing male, leopards had smaller ranges than that of the only other Persion leopard collared prior to this study. We calculated MCP 100% home ranges of 62.9 to 1,098.3 km2.
Between September 2014 and August 2016, we captured six adult leopards (5 males and 1 female) and fitted them with GPS-satellite Iridium collars to provide information on basic ecology of the Persian leopard. Here, we report preliminary findings from the first comprehensive telemetry study on Persian leopard Panthera pardus saxicolor in north-eastern Iran, near the Turkmenistan border. Remote habitat and cryptic nature make the leopards inherently difficult to study while sufficient information is crucial on which to base effective conservation. Comparatively little is known about the socio-spatial organisation of leopards Panthera pardus, and how it affects their probability of population persistence in west and central Asia where the species has lost around 84% of its former range.
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