Solitary predators catch more prey than pack predators.
It is believed that social life goes hand in hand with cognitive abilities: the more complex the social connections, the smarter the animals, roughly speaking. Does this mean that social creatures are more successful in everything and everywhere than non-social ones? After all, intelligence is an elastic concept, and cognitive abilities can be very, very different, intended for different purposes.
We once described behavioral experiments with different predators, solitary (leopards and tigers) and social (lions and hyenas). In the experiment, it was necessary to get a treat from a box by pulling a rope. The results seemed to indicate that social predators are smarter than solitary ones, but other experts doubted that everything is so clear-cut here. Firstly, it is unclear what kind of intelligence the animals demonstrated here: either persistence in learning by trial and error, or the predators demonstrated greater or lesser curiosity in relation to an unfamiliar object, or something else. Secondly, the situation with the box of meat is not very natural for predators. Their intelligence would be better assessed by an example of behavior that is normal for them (for example, pursuing prey).
Deakin University researchers decided to compare how much prey different predators get per unit of time and per hunter. To do this, the researchers took about two hundred articles describing the behavior of a wide variety of animals, from coyotes and wolverines to lynxes, bears, and tigers (although most attention was paid to large predators weighing at least 15 kg). They managed to estimate the “quantity of prey per unit of time” for seventeen species. It turned out that solitary species get more prey than social pack species: for example, one common lynx gets one prey every four days, while one wolf gets one prey every twenty-seven days.
But one prey is one thing, one animal. Maybe pack predators don’t need to hunt often? Indeed, a pack of wolves can kill a very large animal, such as a bison, and on this occasion they can take a break from their work. This is even more clearly seen in the example of cheetahs, which hunt both alone and in groups: a group of cheetahs can kill something larger than when they hunt alone. Another thing that affects the frequency of hunting successes is the hunting method. Predators-pursuers, like the same wolves, can run after prey for quite a long time. And ambush predators do not run anywhere, which obviously saves their strength.
For large predators, such as tigers, leopards, etc., the amount of prey per unit of time is more or less the same, although a tiger is clearly larger than a leopard. Obviously, they choose their victims by size, so the benefit from a single foray is the same, and accordingly, the number of prey pieces is also the same. But cheetahs, pumas, and, for example, wild dogs get more prey than larger predators (both solitary and social), and this is due to the fact that large ones often simply rob or take prey from smaller ones. Here, by the way, sociality is only beneficial: it is more difficult to take something from social large predators, and it is easier for them to rob others – which, in fact, is demonstrated by lions, eating hyenas, wild dogs and cheetahs.
Small predators, like African wild dogs, need to hunt more often because there’s always a risk that a larger animal will take the kill. (Photo: Blake Matheson / Flickr.com)
Here it is necessary to clarify that although we initially spoke about the intelligence of predators, the authors of this review comparison do not mention intelligence. They simply describe the relative successes in hunting of different species with different sociality and different hunting practices. Rather, we ourselves can conclude that it is not worthwhile to simply take and measure cognitive abilities by hunting success, because success here depends on very different factors, including environmental ones.
The researchers also acknowledge in their article Biological Reviewsthat although the studies they relied on covered predators from every continent except Australia, most of the data on “quantity of prey per unit of time” concerned predators in North America. Africa received 24% of the articles, Europe 12.5%, and Asia just 7%. Among specific species, wolves received the most attention, followed by lions, pumas, and Eurasian lynxes. It is understandable why wolves are the leaders in such studies – they are considered to be a major nuisance to agriculture and people in general today. But if we are talking about global ecological studies that take into account the behavior of animals, their physical parameters, and their relationships with each other, then there should be more data, and it should cover a wide variety of species, including Madagascar fossas and Tasmanian devils.
Source: www.nkj.ru
