Optimal foraging of lions at the human wildlands interface

Optimal foraging and landscape of fear theories provide frameworks which can be useful for investigating animal's space and prey use decisions. Predators, such as African lions Panthera leo, are likely to respond to prey abundance, accessibility, profitability and potential risks, often anthropogenic in nature, while making foraging decision. Identifying the relative role of these processes has important conservation implications. We investigated the relative role of responses to a pastoralist landscape of fear within lion feeding and spatial ecology in a landscape at the human-wildlands interface. We collected spatial and predation data from 12 GPS-collared lions and ungulate count data from transects, along the South Africa-Mozambique border, including parts of Kruger, Limpopo and Banhine National Parks. We calculated Jacobs' Index values from 80 kills to investigate lion selection of wild and domestic ungulates as prey, used maximum entropy modelling to predict multi-season ungulate spatial occurrence and used resource selection functions to estimate the relative probability of use of wild and domestic ungulate areas by lions. All lions had access to wild prey and domestic livestock within their home ranges. Lions showed a strong selection for large-bodied wild ungulates as prey taking waterbuck, zebra, kudu and buffalo more frequently then predicted by their availability. Lions showed a slight avoidance of cattle as prey, with cattle outnumbering larger ungulates across much of the study area. Lions showed the greatest selection for habitats with high occurrences of wild prey, specifically areas with kudu, then nyala and buffalo, during the dry seasons and showed strong avoidance of cattle areas during the wet season; a season when cattle are kept closer to settlements and thus better protected and easier to predict and avoid. These results suggest that lions select for wild prey and habitats optimally, yet show a fear response to cattle and cattle areas. This duality in the foraging behaviour of lions suggests that efforts to mitigate human-lion conflict and preserve vulnerable lion populations should focus on both increasing wild ungulate populations as well as exploiting lion's fear of humans with careful consideration of the risks of livestock presence acting as an ecological trap for vulnerable lion populations.