Urban habitat use and home ranges of fishing cats in Colombo, Sri Lanka

Abstract

Urbanisation and habitat loss are major threats to wildlife populations globally. Understanding how species respond to anthropogenic changes is therefore crucial to mitigating threats and developing conservation management strategies. We examined the habitat use of five fishing cats (Prionailurus viverrinus) in Sri Lanka's capital city, Colombo, a densely urbanised landscape with a mosaic of wetland habitats, cultivated areas, and altered open spaces. We investigated: ( 1) to what extent all five cats used human-impacted versus natural wetland habitat; (2) whether there were behavioural shifts to avoid human activity throughout the diel cycle; (3) the home range sizes of two resident females and one resident male, and the extent of the area used by the two translocated males; (4) whether the two translocated males would survive introduction to a new urban environment. We monitored the fishing cats for 637 days (mean = 127) and collected a total of 2278 GPS (5-h interval) collar locations. We found that all five individuals used highly urbanised areas more than we expected. Home range sizes of the three residents were smaller than fishing cat home ranges in less disturbed landscapes. Though our sample size was small, our findings suggest that fishing cats use urbanised areas in Colombo, particularly at night, likely to avoid daytime human activity. Further comprehensive ecological study is needed to explore the aspects of fishing cat ecology that facilitate their persistence, and aid in their conservation across increasingly urbanised areas.

Cats in farms: Ranging behavior of fishing cats (Prionailurus viverrinus) in a human-dominated landscape

“…Our result of signi cantly larger home range sizes of males shing cat compared to females is consistent with previous studies conducted in Nepal, Thailand, and Sri Lanka (Sunquist and Sunquist, 2002;Cutter, 2015;Ratnayaka et al, 2021). In carnivores, males generally try to maximize the coverage of females within their home ranges to increase the chances of breeding, whereas females usually select areas with abundant prey and safe shelters for raising the cubs (Wolff and Peterson, 1998).…”

“…Interestingly, we also documented shing cats using settlements and agriculture areas (~ 30% of the locations). Similar observation of the shing cats using urban and highly altered areas has been reported from Sri Lanka (Ratnayaka et al, 2021).…”

“…There may be two reasons for the relatively larger home range sizes of shing cats in our study, compared to other studies: 1) the automatic location recording by GPS collars increased accuracy of movements and home ranges estimates compared to VHF collars with manual tracking of animals; 2) habitat characteristics of the study area including possible lower prey availability compared to other studies. Only a study in Sri Lanka (Ratnayaka et al, 2021) used GPS collars with ability of automatic recording of multiple GPS locations in a day, providing more accurate account, all other studies used yagi antennas for collecting coordinates of shing cats. The smaller home range size of shing cats in Sri Lanka (Colombo), compared with those in our study, may be explained by higher prey densities of rodents in the urban areas of Colombo city (Ratnayaka et al, 2021).…”

“…Through advanced technologies such as satellite-enabled GPS collars, high-resolution data on space use patterns of species can be accurately obtained. However, the use of satellite collars is limited for less charismatic species like shing cats (Prionailurus viverrinus) (Mukherjee et al, 2016;Ratnayaka et al, 2021).…”

“…Fishing cats are globally 'Vulnerable' with patchy distribution associated with wetlands in South and South-East Asia (Mukherjee et al, 2016). They are known to have variable home ranges, depending on habitat and food availability (Sunquist and Sunquist, 2002;Cutter, 2015;Ratnayaka et al, 2021).…”