African wild dogs reintroduced into Gorongosa National Park

 

Carnivores are finally making a comeback in Gorongosa, more than two decades after a 16-year civil war brutally decimated their numbers.

In a watershed experiment, an international team of scientists is taking a hands-on approach to rebuilding the park’s fauna, first by reintroducing herbivores such as elephant, zebra and wildebeest; and, more recently, working to re-establish healthy populations of carnivores such as lions and wild dogs.

As Gorongosa’s carnivores return, scientists hope to find out what happens when apex predators are unleashed in an environment that has adapted to life without them.


Watch the trailer for the NOVA special on this project!


Robert Pringle, an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at Princeton University, has been visiting Gorongosa since 2012 to study how food availability influences the movement patterns of antelope. Warthogs and antelope such as impala, bushbuck and kudu now make up 98 per cent of the park’s largest omnivores and herbivores. Vegetation flourishes in the open, treeless floodplains, and herds of grazers can fatten there.


Pringle noticed quickly that the animals here behaved differently to those he had observed in places like the Serengeti in Tanzania. Even the usually shy, forest-dwelling bushbuck had brazenly expanded into this habitat, where they started grazing on a type of waterwort plant called Bergia mossambicensis and an invasive shrub, Mimosa pigra. At the time, lions were the only predator in the park, but they don’t tend to hunt in open terrain, so the ecologist suspected the bushbuck's unusual behaviour could be explained by a lack of fear of their main predators, leopards and wild dogs.


To test this idea, Pringle and PhD student Justine Atkins fitted seven floodplain bushbuck, and five less conspicuous individuals roaming the woodlands, with GPS satellite tags that pinged the animals’ location to a tracking system every 15 minutes. They then played recorded leopard calls over a speaker and placed artificial carnivore urine and scat – commercially available pellets soaked in real lion dung that gardeners use to deter domestic cats – to mimic the presence of predators. Bushbuck in the open plains retreated to the relative safety of the dense woodland within 48 hours after the cues were placed. The five individuals that were tracked in the woodlands avoided the cues but didn’t change their behaviour.


It gets really difficult to simulate the presence of predators on a longer timescale, because if you play the sounds long enough, the animals will eventually figure out what’s going on and become habituated
— Rob Pringle, quoted in Wired magazine

“It gets really difficult to simulate the presence of predators on a longer timescale, because if you play the sounds long enough, the animals will eventually figure out what’s going on and become habituated,” says Pringle, acknowledging the limitations of the experimental study, which was published in the journal Science in 2019.

Still, the researchers concluded that the fear of predation may have an effect on bushbuck behaviour – and reintroducing predators to the park could have a similar effect.

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Kika Tuff

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New study from Rob Pringle on how invasive species disrupt habitats