Diets of elusive cats

Wildlife Research in Belize

Conservation research on Belizean mammals

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Finding out what cats eat in the wild

Understanding the food habits of big cats is essential for their conservation because it allows us to identify and manage those prey species that are needed to support a healthy, viable cat population. Because it is very rare to see wild forest-dwelling cats such as jaguars and pumas, let alone to observe them hunting or eating prey, we must turn to an indirect method to discover what they eat.

Most big carnivores are messy eaters, crunching up bones, hair, claws and scales. Most of this material passes through the gut undigested and is deposited in the faeces (scats).

This scat is dissected and the contents compared with a reference collection of hairs and bones from local vertebrates in order to identify the species eaten.

Rare camera trap photo of a jaguar carrying its quarry, an armadillo

The process of scat collection … nothing fancy!

In areas where there is a high richness of potential prey species, such as the neotropics, samples of at least 100 scats may be required to adequately represent the diet, although smaller samples (~50 scats) may be sufficient to represent the more common prey species.

We usually collect scats opportunistically, whilst conducting other types of fieldwork. However, some researchers use specially trained ‘scat detector’ dogs to sniff out carnivore scats which would otherwise remain hidden in the undergrowth.

Example hooves and claws from the reference collection: coati, red brocket deer, paca and white-lipped peccary

We are also investigating alternative, potentially faster and cheaper methods of species identification. For example, it may be possible to train scat detector dogs to distinguish between scats from different cat species, but so far trials have been unsuccessful.

To date we have analysed 362 jaguar and 135 puma scats, the largest diet study of jaguars and pumas in sympatry and investigated how diet varies between protected forest and unprotected lands where cats may have to compete with human hunters for wild game. For more information about our findings please see our Publications.

Often multiple carnivore species may live in the study area so it difficult to know which species deposited the scat. In collaboration with the Global Felids Genetics Program, a sub-sample of every scat is genotyped to determine the species of origin.

Five species of cat coexist in the forests of Belize: jaguars, pumas, ocelots, margays and jaguarondis

Collect the scat ...

… and compare the contents with a reference collection

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