Abstract
Assessing carnivores and prey temporal activity patterns as well as their overlap provides valuable insights into behavioural mitigations of competition. Moon phases may also play an important role in shaping wild mammals’ activity rhythms with prey showing peaks of activity in darkest nights. Camera trapping has enriched the possibility to conduct systematic studies of activity patterns and temporal niche overlap on mammalian guilds. In this study, we used camera traps to investigate intra-guild interactions and temporal partitioning among three meso-carnivores and their common prey in two Mongolian areas characterized, respectively, by a grassland and a forest–alpine meadow. We detected a moderate–high interspecific overlap in red foxes, pikas and tolai hares. We found a moderate overlap of temporal activity patterns among nocturnal carnivores as well as among nocturnal prey species. Interestingly, we observed a moderate overlap between hares and meso-carnivores. Amongst nocturnal species, the red fox and the stoat had a peak in activity in the brightest nights, the stone marten and the Mongolian silver vole preferred to range in dark nights, whereas activity of the tolai hare was not dependent on moon phases. Our work provides some first insights of temporal pattern interactions within a small- and meso-mammal assemblage in Central Asia. Our results indicate that meso-carnivores and their potential prey can co-occur in Central Mongolia by means of temporal partitioning.
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Acknowledgements
We thank all members of the Italian and Danish teams, which collected data in the field and co-funded the data collection in Arkhangai and Tov, sharing the costs. Part of the data used in this work derives from a wider project funded by the Biodiversity Information Facility Asia (BIFA2_02). We thank the Protected Area Department of the Ministry of Environment Green Development and Tourism of Mongolia, and the staff of Khangai Nuuru National Park for supporting this project. We thank our local guide Battoyga and all the local herders for their assistance. Part of the camera traps were kindly provided by the UNIL—University of Lausanne (Switzerland). The Subject Editor Raquel Monclús, Rasmus Worsøe Havmøller and an anonymous reviewer greatly improved our MS with their comments.
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This study was partly supported by Biodiversity Information Facility Asia grant (BIFA2_02).
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EM, CP and CA conceived the study and carried out most analyses, MC organised the dataset and participated in analyses, CA and BM collected field data. All authors participated in writing the MS and approved the final version.
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Mori, E., Paniccia, C., Munkhtsog, B. et al. Temporal overlap among small- and medium-sized mammals in a grassland and a forest–alpine meadow of Central Asia. Mamm Biol 101, 153–162 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42991-020-00085-z
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42991-020-00085-z