Home range and core area utilisation of three co-existing mongoose species: large grey, water and white-tailed in the fragmented landscape of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, South Africa

Abstract

The spatial ecology of the Herpestidae family has remained poorly studied across Africa. The behavioural plasticity and generalist nature of members of the family could be facilitating their expansion in anthropogenically transformed landscapes. Given the current paucity of information on their spatial ecology, knowledge of their spatial movement is important ecological information for the species conservation. Three co-existing mongoose species [large grey (Herpestes ichneumon, n = 5)], water (Atilax paludinosus, n = 5) and white-tailed (Ichneumia albicauda, n = 2) were collared and tracked from September 2016 to October 2017 using Global Positioning System (GPS)–Ultra-high-frequency (UHF) transmitters to determine their home range size and fine-scale spatial movement in the fragmented natural habitat and farmland mosaic landscape of the KwaZulu-Natal Midlands, South Africa. Three home range methods [minimum convex polygon (MCP), kernel density estimation (KDE) and local convex hull (LoCoH)] were used to delineate individual home range size and core area utilisation. The overall mean home range size (95% KDE mean ± S.E.) differed among species: large grey (9.8 ± 8.19 km2), water (13.7 ± 5.30 km2) and white-tailed mongoose (0.9 ± 0.06 km2). The mean core area utilisation size (50% KDE means ± S.E.) for large grey, water and white-tailed mongoose was 2.2 ± 0.77 km2, 3.1 ± 0.96 km2 and 0.2 ± 0.02 km2. Species specific variability in home range size of the study species emphasises this family’s adaptability to their surrounding environment in a changing natural habitat and farmland mosaic landscape. The reduced core area use possibly indicates the availability of high resourceful areas and adequate resources within a comparably small area.