Territorial Behaviour by a Clan of Spotted Hyaenas Crocuta crocuta (original) (raw)
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Territorial, socially monogamous species actively defend their home range against conspecifics to maintain exclusive access to resources such as food or mates. Primates use scent marks and loud calls to signal territory occupancy and limit the risk of intergroup encounters, maximizing their energetic balance. Indri indri is a little-studied territorial, socially monogamous singing primate living in family groups. The groups announce territory occupancy with long-distance calls, and actively defend their territories from conspecific intruders. This work includes data collected in three forests in Madagascar on 16 indri groups over up to 5 years. We aimed (1) to estimate the extent of territories using minimum convex polygon (MCP), implementing minimum sampling effort requirements; (2) to quantify territorial exclusivity, measuring the overlap between territories; and (3) to evaluate the intergroup encounter rate and to quantify the dynamics of group encounters. Our results showed that indris range evenly within exclusive small territories with no or little overlap. Intergroup encounters are rare (0.05 encounters per day), and are located on the periphery of the territories. Disputes were mostly solved with vocal confrontation and only in 13% of the cases ended in physical fights. This frame underlines a cost–benefit explanation of territoriality, favouring a strategy that efficiently limits overlap and avoids costly intergroup encounters. We hypothesize that territorial behaviour in indri is related to mate-guarding strategy and that vocal behaviour plays a fundamental role in regulating intergroup spacing dynamics.
Green Militarization: Anti-Poaching Efforts and the Spatial Contours of Kruger National Park
Building from scholarship charting the complex, often ambivalent, relationship between military activity and the environment, and the more recent critical geographical work on militarization, this article sheds light on a particular meshing of militarization and conservation: green militarization. An intensifying yet surprisingly understudied trend around the world, this is the use ofmilitary and paramilitary personnel, training, technologies, and partnerships in the pursuit of conservation efforts. I introduce this concept, first, as a call for more sustained scholarly investigation into the militarization of conservation practice. More modestly, the article offers its own contribution to this end by turning to South Africa’s Kruger National Park, the world’s most concentrated site of commercial rhino poaching. Focusing on the state’s multilayered and increasingly lethal militarized response to what is itself a highlymilitarized practice, I illustrate how the spatial qualities of protected areas matter immensely for the convergence of conservation and militarization and the concrete forms this convergence takes. For Kruger, these include its status as a national park framed by a semiporous international border and its expansive, often dense terrain. Steering clear of spatial determinism, I equally show how spatial contours authorize militarization only once they articulate with particular assumptions and values; for Kruger these amount to political–ecological values regarding the nation-state, its sovereignty, and its natural heritage. The result is an intensifying interlocking of conservation and militarization that frequently produces unforeseen consequences. Key Words: conservation, militarization, sovereignty, violence, wildlife crime/poaching.
Unexpected Consequences: Wildlife Conservation and Territorial Conflict in Northern Kenya
2012
This article is concerned with the implementation of community-based conservancies (CBC) in conflict ridden pastoralist areas of northern Kenya and whether the creation of protected areas can facilitate the resolution of conflict. Evidence from ethnographic research in East Pokot, Kenya, reveals a mixed picture. In the last decade, three CBCs were established along the administrative borders. Two of them are located in contested areas between the Pokot and neighboring pastoralists. In order to ensure their long-term success in terms of wildlife conservation and economic viability they must act as catalysts for interethnic conflict resolution. In one case, the implementation proved successful, while in the other it exacerbated tensions and led to ethnic violence. In addition, issues of conservation are also embedded in deeper intra-societal struggles over the reconfiguration and renegotiation of access to and control over land. Drawing on ethnographic data and recent literature this research sheds light on unexpected consequences of CBC.
The population consequences of territorial behaviour
Trends in ecology & evolution, 1997
Many organisms compete for space, or for resource that are linked to space. Territorial behavior in animals is one expression of competition for space. Models of competition for space seek to predict how the arrangement of individuals in a population changes as new individuals appear, others die, and neighbors interact with each other; studies of territorial behaviour examine how neighbor interactions lead animals to establish and maintain their use of space. In recent work on compition for space and on territorial behaviour, there has been a shift from simple, general models to ones that incorporate heterogeneity in the spatial and temporal distribution of resources, and in the ways individuals use resources.
The territorial defense hypothesis and the ecology of insular vertebrates
The Quarterly review of biology, 1985
Insular lizards, birds, and mammals in high-density populations often exhibit reduced situation-specific aggression toward conspecifics. This aggressive behavior can be expressed in the form of (1) reduced territory sizes, (2) increased territory overlap with neighbors, (3) acceptance of subordinates on the territory, (4) reduced aggressiveness to certain classes of conspecifics, or (5) abandonment of territorial defense. These behavioral traits can be explained by two nonexclusive hypotheses. The resource hypothesis suggests that territorial behavior is primarily adjusted to resource densities, and that resources are more abundant on islands than on the mainland (e.g., because of a lack of competing species). The defense hypothesis suggests that, in addition to any effects of resources, the costs of defense against both territorial intruders and contenders for vacant territories are higher on islands. Recent theoretical and empirical studies indicate that these behavioral changes c...