There was something odd about the bushbuck, the scientists finally decided
In a new paper in Science, Justine Atkins and her collaborators show that there is now a population of bushbuck in Gorongosa that prefer to graze in the open, that their numbers have been increasing, and that they are, by and large, better fed than their woodland brethren. But on some level, they still possess that age-old fear. When scientists released the scent of a lion on the wind or played the growl of a leopard, the bushbuck headed for the trees.
Ecologists have theorized that when predators are eliminated, prey species will start using resources they would normally have forgone as too risky. This idea had been tested in computer models and in ecosystems such as tide pools, where researchers could remove the predator just by picking it up. The civil war and the decimation of Gorongosa’s wildlife provided a rare, if tragic, opportunity to watch these dynamics on a grand scale, with mammals and large predators.
Curious whether the bushbuck would respond to the signs of a predator, Atkins and her colleagues devised an elaborate spoof: For 48 hours, they deployed speakers playing a leopard’s cries and planted mock lion feces and a repellent developed to mimic the smell of carnivores around the antelopes’ habitat. They found that the animals reverted to grazing in the woods, suggesting that they aren’t immune to the implications of such cues.
“the main thing is seeing what happens to this population as the apex predators are reintroduced to Gorongosa”
