Being the underdog: an elusive small carnivore uses space with prey and time without enemies
By Richard Bischof, H. Ali, M. Kabir, Shaista Hameed, Muhammad Ali Nawaz. 2014
110 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Rare and elusive species are seldom the first choice of model for the study of ecological questions, yet rarity and elusiveness often emerge from ecological processes. One of these processes is interspecific killing, the most extreme form of interference competition among carnivores. Subdominant species can avoid falling victim to other carnivores through spatial and/or temporal separation. The smallest carnivore species, including members of the Mustelidae, are typically the most threatened by other predators but are also exceedingly challenging to study in the wild. As a consequence, we have only limited knowledge of how the most at-risk members of carnivore communities deal with being both hunters and hunted. We explored whether activity and space use of a little-known small carnivore, the Altai mountain weasel Mustela altaica, reflect the activity and distribution of its main prey, pika Ochotona sp., and two sympatric predators, the stone marten Martes foina and the red fox Vulpes vulpes. Spatial and temporal patterns of photographic captures in Pakistan's northern mountains suggest that weasels may cope with being both predator and prey by frequenting areas used by pikas while exhibiting diurnal activity that contrasts with that of the mostly nocturnal/crepuscular stone marten and red fox. Camera trap studies are now common and are staged in many different ecosystems. The data yielded offer an opportunity not only to fill knowledge gaps concerning less-studied species but also to non-invasively test ecological hypotheses linked with rarity and elusiveness.
Subfields: Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7539e56ca78c090ecf0ac092c15b4971da6fb7b2
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In Ecology
In Nature and Landscape Conservation
Citations in the corpus
- Investigating animal activity patterns and temporal niche partitioning using camera‐trap data: challenges and opportunities (2017, background): “For example, Bischof et al. (2014) concluded that the elusive Altai mountain weasel Mustela altaica compensates for spatial overlap with intraguild predators by adopting an inverse activity pattern to its sympatric dominant predators while still maintaining spatial access to prey.”