Wild canids and felids differ in their reliance on reused travel routeways.

ABSTRACT: Diverse factors, including environmental features and cognitive processes, can drive animals' movements and space use, with far-reaching implications. For example, repeated use of individual-level travel routeways (directionally constrained but imperfectly aligned routes), which results in spatial concentration of activity, can shape encounter-based processes including predation, mate finding, and disease transmission. However, how much variation in routeway usage exists across species remains unknown. By analyzing GPS movement tracks for 1,239 range-resident mammalian carnivores-representing 16 canid and 18 felid species from six continents-we found strong evidence of a clade-level difference in species' reliance on repeatedly used travel routeways. Across the global dataset, tracked cani

SUBMITTER: Fagan WF 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC12519222 | biostudies-literature | 2025 Oct

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature