Since my last post I have been a co-author on two research papers on feral cats.

1. Legge S, et al (including Newsome TM) (2017) Enumerating a continental-scale threat: how many feral cats are in Australia? (Biological Conservation) 

In this paper we found that feral cats cover over 99.8% of Australia’s land area, including almost 80% of the area of our islands.

“Australia’s total feral cat population fluctuates between 2.1 million when times are lean, up to 6.3 million when widespread rain results in plenty of available prey,” explains the lead author Dr Sarah Legge from The University of Queensland.

Furthermore, cat densities were found to be the same both inside and outside conservation reserves, such as National Parks, showing that declaring protected areas alone is not enough to safeguard our native wildlife.

This paper has now become the most heavily ‘e-cited’ paper in the journal Biological Conservation. 

A full summary of the media generated can be found HERE

2. Molsher R, Newsome AE, Newsome TM, Dickman CR (2017) Mesopredator management: effects of red fox control on the abundance, diet and use of space by feral cats (PLOS ONE)

In this paper we investigated interactions between red foxes and feral cats in south-eastern Australia.

We used a fox-removal experiment to assess whether foxes affect cat abundance, diet, home-range and habitat use.

The results provide little indication that cats responded numerically to the fox removal, but suggest that the fox affects some aspects of cat resource use. In particular, where foxes were removed cats increased their consumption of invertebrates and carrion, decreased their home range size and foraged more in open habitats.

The results suggest that fox control programs could lead to changes in the way that cats interact with co-occurring prey, and that some prey may become more vulnerable to cat predation in open habitats after foxes have been removed.

The paper was featured in the NRM Research and Innovation Network weekly updates.