Podcast

A citizen science study found that domestic cats in urban areas have a significant ecological impact. The study tracked 925 cats in four countries using GPS trackers. The cats were found to spend most of their time in disturbed areas rather than natural areas. They also had small home ranges compared to wild cats. The average cat killed 12 to 39 prey items per year, which can have a big impact when considering the high density of cats in urban areas. This poses a risk to native species. Citizen science projects like this provide valuable data and learning opportunities for students. So, next time you let your cat outside, remember you're participating in science too. Have you ever had that moment when your cat has come home and left a lovely present from their hunt at your doorstep? Most people will dispose of this evidence quickly and try to forget their furry friend's predator instincts exist, but in doing so you may be part of the problem. A recent citizen science study found that the high density of domestic cats in urban areas may have significant ecological impact. What are these impacts and how can you help? You're about to find out here on Bear Necessities. I'm Megan Johnson. I'm really excited about this episode guys because this is something you can do at home with your kids and get them involved in science too. It's a citizen science project which means it's a real science research project where the general public is actually involved in conducting research. How cool is that? All right, let's get into it. So this study tracked 925 cats from four different countries including the United States, the UK, Australia, and New Zealand using cat trackers. So citizen volunteers placed small GPS trackers on their cats and tracked their movements for at least five days, but some had data up to 20 days or more. Each volunteer was asked to fill out a questionnaire regarding their cat's typical habits and behaviors and data was collected about what kinds of areas the cats were tracked through. All of this data was compiled and evaluated using statistical analysis to determine what possible ecological impacts arise from letting your family pets roam free. But what they found was actually pretty interesting. The researchers looked at several different aspects of behavior. To start, they looked at where these cats spent most of their time and it appeared that a majority of the cats were tracked to disturbed areas as compared to natural areas, which is important when you also consider that they found that the house cats had fairly small home ranges with an average of about 3.6 hectares or about seven football fields if you're into sports. This range is actually pretty small when you compare it to wild species of cats which have a typical range almost 20 times larger. In square miles, they'll be about going from a 0.01 square mile range for a house cat to almost a quarter of a square mile range for wild cats. After also looking at hunting patterns, they found that the average cat killed 12 to 39 prey items per year. This number doesn't seem like it would have that much of an effect on the ecology. After all, what is 12 plus mice, right? They seem to be everywhere. But when you take into account the fact that in an urban area, all of these cats are hunting within the same couple of square miles. These researchers concluded that domestic cats in urban areas can have just as much or even more of an ecological impact than wild cats because of this high density. Unfortunately, this leaves a native species in areas at high risk for predation. The Citizen Science Project is one of the largest to track animal movement and it's because of the ability of scientists to collect more data by involving the general public than they would have been able to collect on their own. And this has allowed for comparison of ecological impacts in different environments that has not been able to be seen before in smaller scale projects. This project and others like it have also provided learning opportunities for students beginning their science journey. So next time you let your cat outside, remember, you could be participating in science too. Thanks for listening and we'll see you next time when we'll be discussing secrets in your home that could be destroying your air quality. We hope our podcast can help you rest at ease with just the bare necessities.