A predator has to eat, but sometimes what you eat harms what you eat, people who share the landscape, and this often leads to the death of the carnivore.
Arched corrals are a strategy used in Tanzania to protect cattle and endangered carnivores. But where do lions, leopards and hyenas go for dinner? Do you feed yourself from the next flock?
A new study led by Colorado State University has found that good fences make really good neighbors, as paving housing also benefit custody coast that live nearby. Instead of eating on lighter meals next door and negatively influencing neighbors that have no enriched housings, predators seem to avoid the neighborhoods completely if some corrals from chain-link fences are built, which is more effective than traditional African boma fences from thorny bushes.
These surprising results show the first to show an advantageous spillover effect from a strategy for reducing the conflict with large carnivors that play an important role in ecosystems. Ripple effects that disrupt the food network and influence environmental health can cause the loss of predators of APEX.
“The coexistence between humans and carnivors is a global challenge, and conflicts that arise from carburopers that attack the cattle is one of the most important coexistence threats worldwide, including here in the Rocky Mountain West and Colorado,” said Kevin Crooks, co-author of the study and director of the CSU Cernivore. “Our results provide important evidence of the effectiveness of proactive, non-fatal instruments to prevent the predators through food by carnivores, which not only benefits the target household, but possibly also neighboring households.”
The senior author Jonathan Salerno, an extraordinary professor of the CSU department for human dimensions of natural resources, said that the examined intervention method is only applicable in limited contexts in the West of the United States, the need to understand the complex interactions between predators, humans and conflict intervention.
“Understanding this dynamic can help to lead the use of nature conservation resources and to support better results for people, cattle and endangered species,” he added.
Chainlink connected with certainty, savings
In an earlier study published in January, Salerno and his employees showed a critical landscape for the large carnivora in an area around the Ruaha National Park in south of Tanzania in south of Tanzania. In this agropastorist system, farm animals are kept in fenced connections at night when predators are active and are driven into common areas during the day.
Among other things, the park and the surrounding nature reserves protect 10% of the African lions in the world, but every household that borders on the park has a chance of about 30%, one or more of its animals to predators every year, a significant economic loss for these little farmers.
Conservation Organization Lion Landscapes subsidized 75% of the costs for paved housings for zookeepers near the park, which decided to implement the intervention and cover the remaining 25% of the construction costs. A cost-benefit analysis published in the newspaper showed that after only five years, the advantages of preventing animal taxes were three to seven times higher than the amounts paid by pet owners.
“The break-even point is between three months and two years because the loss of a cow is a considerable amount of prosperity,” said Salerno. “So reduce the risk in such a way that the fortified housing actually pays itself relatively quickly for yourself.”
Using monthly data from 758 cattle breeding households from 2010 to 2016, the first study also showed that the chain-link corrals were 94% effective in order to reduce the risk of predator effectively and in the long term.
Advantageous Spillover effect
The new study, published on March 6th in Conservation lettersExamined 25,000 monthly reports from cattle coasts and found that the neighbors of the households with chain left corrals also reported fewer attacks on their cattle. For the first time, an advantageous spillover effect was proven. The study used data collected by Lion Landscapes and sustainably financed by the CSU School for Global Environment.
“This research provides scientific knowledge about the effectiveness of anti-pregnancy interventions that not only reduce animal losses, but also have positive spillover effects and promote coexistence between humans and carnation,” said co-author Joseph Francis Kaduma, a research manager with lion landscapes. “By demonstrating how non -fatal methods can benefit both humans and wild animals, the study offers practical maintenance solutions that can be scaled like similar conflicts worldwide.”
Why do the carnivores stay away?
While the study does not answer this question, Salerno said that it was possible that the neighborhoods with housings for predators are simply too much work.
“The neighborhood with three or four housings will represent more risks or more efforts for the carnivore, since you know that you cannot pull the cattle out of the fortified housings, even though some leopards will try a goat or sheep,” he said. “It reduces availability; the nightly cattle buffet is simply less accessible and attractive.”
Why not the park?
Like many national parks, the Ruaha National Park is enormous and it is not possible to lock it into a chain-link fence. The fencing of the park would also have negative ecological consequences due to the isolation of wild animals and the elimination of people would cause even greater conflicts between nearby communities and nature conservation interests, said Salerno.
Case study for a global problem
Lion Landscapes has long -term relationships with local zookeepers and diligently persecuted the data that these studies supported. Salerno said that this type of data from other locations would help nature conservation organizations and wildlife managers to find solutions for similar conflicts.
“If we collect this data, we can understand which factors contribute to predator events on a certain ranch and take into account the complexity of the larger system, we can understand which methods will be effective,” he added.