House Cat Home Range

A blog post by Derik Verkest and Bo Nash

Background/Introduction

As stated in the title of this blog; the contents of the blog are both a visual and written summary of data analysis of the home range of house cats. A home range itself is considered the actual physical area covered in the course of the regular movements of the animal being tracked. This is essentially and area or range where the animal goes on a daily basis. This differs from a territory, which is more commonly known, as the territory is an area that an animal defends. This area tends to have resources or something essential that the animal wants. You might be wondering: Why does the house cat need to have a home range? This is because any animal has to go gather resources it needs to live. If resources are far away the home range will be larger than if resources were close by. The house cats gave data to this lab by wearing a collar that transmits a GPS signal. This specific scientific technique is called radiotelemetry. The reason that home ranges are important is because these house cats can cause problems the world of conservation, but this information also shows social organization, foraging behavior, and even habitat requirements of these animals. Below you will find a graph that accumulates 90 different cats’ data. 30 cats from USA, 30 from Australia, and 30 from New Zealand.

Results

Data was collected using the Movebank website, GoogleEarth, and Earth Point. Movebank is a website that collects tracking data for various animals all over the world. First, we searched Felis catus to narrow down our search to the common house cat. Thirty cats were picked at random from the USA, New Zealand and Australia, and coordinate information was downloaded and opened in GoogleEarth. Once the tracking information was opened in GoogleEarth, a polygon was drawn around the area of the home range for each cat, copied, then pasted into Earth Point where the area of the home range, in hectares, was calculated.

Once the home range area for all 90 cats was collected, the mean home range area for each country was calculated and compared (Fig. 1). The mean home range areas for New Zealand and the USA are roughly the same (about 6-8 hectares), but Australia’s mean home range area is 12 hectares; double that of New Zealand. Finally, a one-way ANOVA was ran on all three home range means, resulting in a p-value of 0.14 (>0.05). This indicates that there is no significant difference between the three means.

Some of the common habitats seen in these home ranges include urban areas, suburban areas with moderate tree density, and rural areas with moderate tree coverage and open fields. An environmental trend seen is that larger home ranges were almost always in rural areas with big open fields, and smaller home ranges were almost always in urban/suburban environments. Another trend seen was that houses were a common destination nodes, and when there was a field nearby the cats were inclined to explore it. Cats may be more attracted to fields for the same reason other predators are; rodents are easy to spot and chase down in an open field.

Conclusion

Overall, cats tend to have a smaller home range in urban/suburban areas, and a larger home range in rural areas. There were some cats that didn’t follow this idea, but individual cat personality, as well as uncontrolled variables like competing with other cats, may have had an influence on this. Based on the home ranges gathered, cats have the potential to have a serious environmental impact, especially when dozens of cats are allowed to roam free in a single neighborhood. If a cat has the ability to look over a reasonably large home range when given the opportunity but is confined to smaller spaces, then the effects that cat has will be greatly amplified. In other words, the mortality rate of many animal species in the smaller home range area will greatly increase.

Future Plans

Now that the home range is found for these cats, we can start to implement this data into city planning. If there was a city planner that not only wanted to help conservation of native species, but also keep house cats safe, they should take into account some details. The first being that there should be a perimeter around 12 hectacres of any housing district where there would be minimal damage to native wildlife. This is because 12 is the maximum home range found in the data above. This area should still have trees and shrubs, but not those that can house native wildlife. Outside of this specified area There should also be perhaps structures that the cats can climb so that way they will be ok with not going into forested areas where natural wildlife would be housed.

Peer Reviewed Research Article

The following peer review article studies the impact that feral cats have on the surrounding environment. The study also finds the home ranges of many cats that have turned feral and their impact that they had on natural wildlife. This wildlife included small mammals and birds mainly. These cats were also found to be carriers of pathogens. Previous studies found that SARS and the avian flu were both carried by feral cats to humans. The study captured a total of nine feral cats and found that the minimum distance traveled was 32,000 meters squared and the maximum was 351,000 meters squared. Although these home ranges were far larger than those in our study, the impact that these cats had on the ecological systems around them was profound. Both studies found the cats to be roaming in large areas over long periods of time. This is to collect resources such as food. This is the problem because the food that they end up taking is native wildlife that we are trying to conserve.

Citation: Moon, O., Lee, H., Kim, I., Kang, T., Cho, H., & Kim, D. (2013). Analysis of the Summer Season Home Range of Domestic Feral Cats (Felis catus) – Focused on the Surroundings of Rural and Suburban Areas. Journal of Asia-Pacific Biodiversity, 6(3), 391–396. https://doi.org/10.7229/jkn.2013.6.3.391

Works Cited

• Beasley, Deanna. “Week 14: Calculating Animal Home Ranges in Human Modified Environments.” Spring Ecology Lab Manual, University of Tennessee at Chattanooga, 2020, pp.59-62
• Moon, O., Lee, H., Kim, I., Kang, T., Cho, H., & Kim, D. (2013). Analysis of the Summer Season Home Range of Domestic Feral Cats (Felis catus) – Focused on the Surroundings of Rural and Suburban Areas. Journal of Asia-Pacific Biodiversity, 6(3), 391–396. https://doi.org/10.7229/jkn.2013.6.3.391

Credit

Derik Verkest: Results, Bar Graphs, Conclusion

Bo Nash: Background/Introduction, Future Plants, Peer Reviewed Article