Abstract
Wild prey base is a potential regulatory parameter that supports successful propagation and secured long term survival of large predators in their natural habitats. Therefore, low wild prey availability with higher available livestock in or around forest areas often catalyzes livestock depredation by predators that eventually leads to adverse situations to conservation initiatives. Thus understanding the diet ecology of large predators is significant for their conservation in the areas with low prey base. The present study reports the diet ecology of tiger and leopard in Udanti Sitanadi Tiger Reserve and Bhoramdeo Wildlife Sanctuary, in central India to know the effect of wild prey availability on prey predator relationship. We walked line transects to estimate prey abundance in the study areas where we found langur and rhesus macaque to be the most abundant species. Scat analysis showed that despite the scarcity of large and medium ungulates, tiger used wild ungulates including chital and wild pig along with high livestock utilization (39%). Leopards highly used langur (43–50 %) as a prime prey species but were observed to exploit livestock as prey (7–9 %) in both the study areas. Scarcity of wild ungulates and continuous livestock predation by tiger and leopard eventually indicated that the study areas were unable to sustain healthy large predator populations. Developing some strong protection framework and careful implementation of the ungulate augmentation can bring a fruitful result to hold viable populations of tiger and leopard and secure their long term survival in the present study areas in central India, Chhattisgarh.
Highlights
Investigating diet composition of a predator is vital to indicate the adequacy of prey base and understand prey requirements
Hayward et al (2012) categorized Leopard as a predator that exploits over one hundred prey species but prefers to kill prey items within 10–50 kg body weight which may deviate to 15–80 kg (Stander et al 1997), depending on their hunger level, hunting efforts and sex (Bothma & Le Riche 1990; Mondal et al 2011)
Study areas Bhoramdeo Wildlife Sanctuary (BWS) is spread over 351.25km2 and situated in the Maikal Range of central India (Figure 1)
Summary
Investigating diet composition of a predator is vital to indicate the adequacy of prey base and understand prey requirements. The tiger Panthera tigris as a large solitary predator requires >8 kg of meat daily to maintain its body condition (Schaller 1967; Sunquist 1981) It hunts a varied range of prey species based on their availability in a particular landscape; this may include large bovids such as Indian Gaur (Karanth & Sunquist 1995) to small animals like hares, fish, and crabs (Johnsingh 1983; Mukherjee & Sarkar 2013). In India these large carnivores are gradually confined within the fragmented forest habitats that share sharp boundaries that home dense human populations Areas like these experience intensive grazing by domestic and feral cattle, and simultaneous forest resource utilization by local people have been degrading tiger habitats in terms of retarded growth of vegetation, increase in abundance of weeds and depletion of natural prey base (Madhusudan 2000). The present study will eventually attribute to such important aspects of resource management of the large carnivore populations in both the study areas
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