Study Species
Asia’s largest obligate terrestrial carnivore, the tiger is categorized
as Endangered under the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. In India,
it is listed in Schedule I of the Indian Wildlife (Protection) Act,
1972, under the highest level of protection. Tigers are wide-ranging,
territorial felids but the size of current PAs in India are too small to
maintain viable populations of this species over time. Tigers subsist in
metapopulations with ongoing efforts to identify, link and conserve
corridors. The leopard is a highly adaptable, widely distributed felid,
and is listed as Vulnerable under the IUCN Red List. In India, the
leopard is also listed in Schedule I of the Indian Wildlife (Protection)
Act, 1972. Wherever leopards co-exist with tigers, lions or dholes, a
high degree of intraguild competition is observed (Hayward & Slotow,
2009; Wang & Mcdonald, 2009). Leopards display great behavioural
plasticity by shifting feeding preferences, space use, micro-habitat use
and activity pattern (Karanth & Sunquist, 2000) which enables them to
survive in human-altered landscapes. The Asiatic wild dog or dhole is a
shy, social canid and is the only extant species of the genusCuon . The monotypic species is listed under the Endangered
category of the IUCN Red List and is protected under Schedule II of
India’s Wildlife (Protection) Act, 1972. In Asia, dholes are one of the
top predators of tropical forests. Across their range in India, dholes
share habitat with large carnivores like the tiger, and leopard.
Previous studies on dholes have focused on intraguild competition,
behavioral ecology, and genetics (Johnsingh, 1980, Acharya, 2007,
Hayward, Lyngdoh, & Habib 2014, Ghaskadbi, Habib, & Qureshi 2016, Modi
et al., 2018, Habib et al., 2018) but information on their movement
ecology is limited. The Indian wolf is distributed across Central India,
up to Rajasthan in the north and Karnataka in the south (Shahi, 1982)
and is categorized as Endangered by the IUCN Red List of Endangered
Species. It is protected under Schedule I of the Wildlife (Protection)
Act 1972. The wolf is an iconic top predator in the open grasslands and
adapted themselves to survive in the human dominated landscape (Shahi,
1982; Jhala, 1991; Habib, 2007). Evolutionarily, the Indian grey wolf is
a part of an ancient clade which has not mixed with the wolf-dog clade,
making them genetically ancient and unique among other wolves of the
world (Sharma, Maldonado, Jhala, & Fleischer 2004; Shrotriya, Lyngdoh,
& Habib 2012).