Human meddling has altered the way African wild dogs hunt, and now they're chasing prey like cheetahs, according to a new study.
Often targeted by humans as vermin, the dogs appear to have given up high-endurance pack hunting in favor of hunting with short bursts of speed, like the record-breaking cheetah cat, which has a similar range and diet to the dogs.
Unlike the multitudes of domestic dogs on our planet, however, the African wild dog (Lycaon pictus) is very endangered.
For hundreds of years, humans have killed the dogs as vermin and their population has fallen to an estimated 7,000 dogs. Protecting the African wild dog has proven tough for conservationists because their wide range makes them difficult to track.
The dogs used to hunt prey similar to how humans used to — slowly chase a big animal in groups for miles until it gets exhausted. But environmental pressure has pushed them off the plains into more wooded areas and led them to adopt a new hunting strategy: Run fast and hunt alone.
The study, published in the journal Nature, used GPS collars to follow the wild dogs.
In addition to tracking the dogs' locations, sensors on the collars also detected how fast they were moving while hunting big prey like gazelles and impalas. And researchers were surprised by what they recorded.
Although the dogs' speed didn't come close to a cheetah's (up to 70 mph in a short sprint), they did chase down their prey over nearly twice the distance compared to the speedy cats.
Tracking the dogs also showed that, while they still lived in packs, they did not cooperate during hunts — multiple dogs almost never converged at the same spot during a high-speed chase. But once a kill was made, the group would meet to share the food, following the respectful pecking order of the pack.
However, burst-speed hunting resulted in fewer kills for the wild dogs compared to the standard endurance-based, pack-hunting technique. Less than 16% of the high-peed chases led to a kill, wheras working in a pack was more than twice as effective on average (the more dogs, the higher the kill rate).
Lucky for the dogs, sharing their food made up for the inefficiency.
This habitat and hunting flexibility shows that the African wild dog is a highly adaptive species, and could be a good sign for their survival — even if they need to act like cats to do it.
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