Limpopo Valley Carnivores

Category: Hyena | Date: Sep 28 2009 | By: limpopocarnivores

A Spotted Hyeana carcass was found on the road recently, with its head, feet and tail all removed. In some areas people view Hyeanas with a  high degree of superstition and their body parts are often used for traditional medicine. It was badly mutilated and is was unclear if it had been killed on the road, and had its body parts removed in situ, or if the remains of the body had simply been dumped there. Roadkill is a big threat in this area, and we suspect this was the cause, and that it was nothing more sinister. Plans for a project looking at the extent, impact and mitigation of roadkill in this area are underway.

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Category: Uncategorized | Date: Sep 11 2009 | By: limpopocarnivores

Well, the cameras have been out and we are starting to get a few photos.

The first one is on farmland where two male cheetahs are checking out the scent marks left by other cheetahs on this water pump. You may think of cheetahs as being typically diurnal species, but we have found that on farmland they are often active at night. I think this is because of the fact that on most farmland areas there are no lions forcing cheetahs to be active during the heat of the day when they are sleeping it off under a tree. Added to that is the fact that farmers often replace lions as the cheetah’s biggest threat, and they tend to be more active during the day.

The second photo is the back end of a pair of cheetahs that have been active in a particular area all week. They were seen at the beginning of the week with Joan, our collared female, and have stayed in the same area. Sadly, the fact that Joan was fraternising with adult male cheetahs just a week or two after her expected due date suggests that she has lost her cubs and come back into heat. Perhaps it is a blessing in disguise, and she will have her cubs in another 3 months at the onset of the Impala lambing season when food to feed her growing family will be readily available.

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Category: Snoopy and Barclay | Date: Sep 03 2009 | By: limpopocarnivores

We have been diligently collecting Brown Hyeana scats as part of our census with a view to analysing the DNA to identify the individuals within the population. Being a less known and less studied species, however, little genetic work has been done on them to date, and we are not confident that the genetic markers currently available for the species will be enough to identify individual animals accurately. Once again, we are turning to the dogs for help. A study in Russia successfully trained dogs to identify individual Amur Tigers from their scats, using known samples. The dogs’ sense of smell is so good they can tell which sample comes from which cat, by matching them together.

We do not have known Hyeana scats, but we do have samples from other species such as the Wild Dog that we know exactly which individual they came from. We will use these samples for training and for testing, then run the trial blind on our Hyeana samples. This will give us a population estimate that we can compare with other census methods to assess it’s efficacy. If it is successful, it may well open alot of doors for cheap and non-invasive carnivore sampling in Africa, without the need for expensive DNA analysis.

 Police Bloodhounds have been shown to be able to accuractly discriminate between closely related individuals, but not between monozygotic or identical twins, so it seems there is a genetic component in the smell. Today is the first day of training for this project, so watch this space to see how we progress!

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