![]() ![]() ![]() The researchers almost never saw two or more wild dogs homing in on the same spot during a chase, they report online today in Nature Communications. They never approached the maximum speed of a cheetah, about 29 meters per second, but often sustained a chase almost twice the distance as the big cat. "The application of new technologies allow greater insights into the study of a species that is hard to observe and moves over great distances," says Joshua Ginsberg, a wildlife ecologist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies in Millbrook, New York, who was not involved with the work.Īll together, the tags catalogued more than 1500 runs of up to 3 meters per second-a fast trot-and during two-thirds of them, the wild dog more than doubled its speed temporarily, indicating it was chasing an impala, dik-dik, or other prey down. By recording and mapping the simultaneous movement of the six animals, Wilson's team could reconstruct the pack's activity. (They shy away from people-their primary predator-but are approachable by car, which they seem to have no fear of.) The collars also had sensors that detect how fast the animal is moving. To compare the efficiency of the two strategies, Wilson and his colleagues put battery- and solar-powered GPS collars on all six adult members of a wild dog pack in Botswana and on a few wild dogs from a dozen other packs. Wild dogs ( Lycaon pictus) live in the same places and eat the same foods as these big cats, but supposedly hunt much differently. Often praised as the fastest land animal on the planet, the cheetah tends to hunt and feed alone, capturing antelope, impala, and other prey with short bursts of incredible agility and rapid acceleration, his team found in 2013. Conservationists have struggled to help this species recover, but packs can roam hundreds of kilometers, making them difficult to keep track of.Īlan Wilson, a biomechanist at the Royal Veterinary College, Hertfordshire, in the United Kingdom, first became interested in wild dogs when he was studying cheetahs. Most live on wooded or partially wooded savanna, not open plains. Wild dogs-brown- and black-spotted, big-eared distant relatives of dogs and wolves that stand less than a meter tall-used to be common throughout much of Africa, but a couple hundred years ago people began shooting them as vermin. A 5-month study of wild dogs wearing special tracking collars shows that these animals tend to stick to short chases, rarely, if ever, coordinating their hunting-a strategy that may help the endangered species survive. Distant relatives of man's best friend, these carnivores once hunted antelopelike animals across the open plains of East Africa for tens of kilometers before taking their quarry down as a group. Wild dogs have a reputation they no longer deserve. ![]()
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