Where did the cats go?
A brief summary of a study,
"Cats are rare where coyotes roam", by Roland Kays, Robert Costello, Tavis Forrester, Megan C. Baker, Arielle W. Parsons, Elizabeth L. Kalies, George Hess, Joshua J. Millspaugh and William McShea
DISCLAIMER: This story book is complete with Cute Cat Pictures. Enter at your own risk.
Swipe to flip through the pages
Created by: Christian Wang 2017
Cute Cats?
What can cats do to our world?
Cats are CUTE but they also are responsible for the deaths of 1.4-3.7 billion birds and 6.9 to 20.7 billion mammals every year according to research conducted by the Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service
Humans killed the dodo not cats
Cats have a natural predator, the coyote...
The Culprit?
WOW! There's so many national parks in the USA
Prior to this study,
the whereabouts of cats and their influence of protected areas such as national parks in the United States was unknown...
Researchers didn't know if there were many cats living in protected areas...
In fact there wasn't any data on where cats lived...
Look how sad they are ;(
The Study
The Researchers,
recruited and trained 486 volunteers to set up camera traps.
They don't actually trap anything, they just take pictures of wildlife
Volunteers then used custom software to identify wildlife species, upload camera pictures and additional data such as the location of the camera
The researchers then, reviewed the submissions and edited wildlife classifications.
The data was analyzed to find the relationship between cat abundance and housing density and the relationship between cat abundance and coyote abundance.
The Results
Researchers found out that most cats live in urban areas with very few living in protected areas
Interestingly enough, researchers also found out that coyotes mostly live in protected areas with very few living in urban areas
Using the data gathered, the researchers were able to conclude that in regions where coyote populations are higher, there are fewer cats
Here's some more cat pics
Works Cited
Clark D. Cats Kill Billions of Animals Annually, Study Finds. ABC News. 2013 Jan 30 [accessed 2017 Nov 5]. http://abcnews.go.com/Technology/cats-kill-billions-animals-annually-study-finds/story?id=18357853
Roland Kays, Robert Costello, Tavis Forrester, Megan C. Baker, Arielle W. Parsons, Elizabeth L. Kalies, George Hess, Joshua J. Millspaugh, William McShea; Cats are rare where coyotes roam, Journal of Mammalogy, Volume 96, Issue 5, 29 September 2015, Pages 981–987, https://doi.org/10.1093/jmammal/gyv100
