Lion reintroduction demonstrates that resident cheetah have a spatially reactive response to lion

Abstract

AbstractCompetition occurs between species for shared resources and the subordinate species can reduce this by avoiding competitors, either proactively or reactively. Cheetah are subordinate members of the African large carnivore guild, vulnerable to losing resources or being killed by larger carnivores. We directly investigate how cheetah space and habitat use are affected by the reintroduction of lion 9 years after cheetah reintroduction. We explored whether cheetah respond on the spatial scale proactively (contracting home range, low overlap and differences in habitat use), reactively (located further than expected at random from lions) or did not respond to lion presence at given monitoring points. We found that there was no difference in cheetah habitat use nor their home range/core area size. Moreover, cheetah home range/core areas overlapped extensively with that of lions. Revealingly, cheetah were located further than expected at random from lions. Our results support a reactive response by cheetah to lion presence. Using this unplanned experiment, we were able to grow our knowledge on the competition occurring between these two large carnivores, by determining that lions did not displace cheetah except on the fine scale. These results can also be of particular use for managers of reserves or metapopulations who are trying to conserve both species sympatrically.