Abstract
While anthropogenic land‐use changes threaten wildlife globally, some species take advantage of such changes and disperse into urban areas. The wildlife in urban areas often promotes conflicts with humans, notably when the animals are associated with the spread of zoonotic diseases. In Israel, current urban invasion of rock hyraxes (Procavia capensis) draws public attention, since the species is a reservoir host of cutaneous leishmaniasis, a serious skin disease. The rock hyrax, however, has seldom been studied in densely populated areas, and the drivers for its urban expansion, as well as its abilities to live and spread in core urban areas, are relatively unknown. Here, we explore the rock hyrax expansion to urban areas process by examining the availability, characteristics and use of shelter along an urban gradient. Our findings suggest that a series of factors determines shelter availability and quality for the rock hyrax, which facilitates its dispersion across the urban gradient. We found that rock hyraxes from the Judean Desert expand to the peri‐urban region of Jerusalem by colonizing new rocky shelters formed as by‐products of urban development. With their populations reaching extreme densities in this area and saturating the available shelters, there is some spill over to the adjacent core urban areas where they colonize littered sites, which are made available due to the local socio‐economic conditions and cultural norms of waste disposal and illegal placement of temporary structures. Our work emphasizes the significance of the urban gradient approach for studying the mechanisms promoting wildlife expansion to cities. Our findings suggest that changes in shelter availability and quality due to urban development, and cultural norms promote shifts of the hyrax population by pushing from the already established areas and pulling into new environment across the urban gradient.
Highlights
Urbanization is one of the major globally drivers in reducing and fragmenting the land available to wild animals (Mcdonald, Kareiva, & Forman, 2008)
Our results indicate that land cover changes of the peri-urban areas have promoted hyrax expansion through the creation of new rocky habitats, while the socio-economic conditions and cultural norms of human residents are providing niches in the core urban areas where hyraxes find undisturbed shelters and supplementary food
We document for the first time that rock hyraxes have become established in the densely populated urban areas, and their populations in core urban areas are reproducing
Summary
Urbanization is one of the major globally drivers in reducing and fragmenting the land available to wild animals (Mcdonald, Kareiva, & Forman, 2008). Rock hyraxes in South Africa has shown that they are able to inhabit human settlements, having developed s reduced fear of humans and learnt to exploit artificial shelters, and additional food sources near residential areas (Mbise et al, 2017; Naylor, 2015; Wiid & Butler, 2015). These and other previous studies of rock hyrax and human interactions (Kershenbaum & Blaustein, 2011; Moran et al, 1987) took place in natural or suburban environments and there is no documentation to date of rock hyraxes colonizing core urban areas. Given the emergence of leishmaniasis in Jerusalem, we predicted that the rock hyraxes would be found to already establish colonies inside the city (Figure 1)
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