Browsing by Author "Morling, Frances"

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    Cape Town's cats: reassessing predation through kitty-cams
    (2014) Morling, Frances; Simmons, Robert E; O'Riain, Justin
    Domestic cats (Felis catus) are abundant generalist predators that exploit a wide range of prey within and adjacent to the urban matrix. Cats are known to have contributed to the extinction and endangerment (mostly on islands) of a number of indigenous species, including birds, small mammals, reptiles and amphibians. Most research on this important topic has been carried out in the developed world, predominantly in Australia, New Zealand, the U.K., the U.S. and Canada with only four studies carried out in Africa. Of these, two studies in Cape Town suggest that domestic cats have a big impact on wildlife but these studies may have underestimated predation because they failed to account for the proportion of prey not returned to participants’ homes. In this study I used kitty-cams in an attempt to provide a prey correction factor for urban cats in Cape Town, South Africa. I investigated hunting of wildlife by free-ranging domestic cats in Newlands, a suburb of Cape Town, South Africa over 5 weeks in 2013. I monitored 13 cats (6 deep-urban and 7 urban-edge) by questionnaire survey, asking cat owners to record all prey items returned by their cats. A total of 43 prey items were returned, 42% of which were small mammals, 30% invertebrates, 12% reptiles, 9% amphibians and 7% birds. Combining these data with two similar survey studies carried out in Cape Town I estimated that a total of 118 cats caught an average of 0.04 prey items per cat per day. Ten of the 13 cats were also monitored for 3 weeks using kitty-cam video cameras. Participating cats wore a video camera and all activity was analysed for prey captures and behavioural activity patterns.
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    Seasonal Movement Patterns of Urban Domestic Cats Living on the Edge in an African City
    (Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 2023-03-10) Simmons, Robert E.; Seymour, Colleen L.; George, Sharon T.; Peters, Koebraa; Morling, Frances; O’Riain, M. Justin
    How domestic cats use open spaces around their homes is unstudied in Africa, and this has conservation implications given their high rate of predation on native prey. We GPStracked a sample of cats in summer and winter to understand habitat and area use and distances travelled. Since Cape Town surrounds the Table Mountain National Park (TMNP), we also determined how often cats ventured into protected areas. A far greater proportion of cats (59% of 78) returned prey home in summer than winter (30% of 27), and summer ranges were significantly greater and ca. three-fold larger than those in winter (3.00 ha vs. 0.87 ha). Urban-edge (UE) cats travelled up to 850 m from their homes and both urban (U) and UE cats entered natural habitat. All seven GPS-collared UE cats (and one of seven U) ventured into protected areas in summer and two of four UE (and two of five U) cats did so in winter. Thus, our data suggest that cats may regularly hunt in protected areas, especially in summer. Yet they may also limit the time spent in such habitats due to predation risk from meso-carnivores. The threat to biodiversity in protected areas by owned cats necessitates further layers of protection. Cat-free buffers of ~600 m, based on the average movements reported here, may reduce domestic cat predation in protected areas.