The response of feral cats to olfactory and audio cues; implications for prey impacts and predator management
Kylie N. McQualter, Molly M. Barlow, Natasha E. Tay, Katherine E. MosebyContext
Predation by feral cats (Felis catus) adversely affects Australian wildlife, including native reptiles. Feral cat management often involves the use of traps or baits with lures to attract cats; however, the effectiveness of different lure types has been inconsistent. By understanding how cats use sensory cues to hunt, more effective lures could be developed to improve cat management.
Aims
To investigate the responses of cats to audio and olfactory lures that mimic prey cues, with a focus on reptiles. As olfactory cues persist longer in the environment, it was hypothesised that olfactory lures would be visited more often than auditory cues because cats repeatedly check whether prey is present. In comparison, it was predicted that auditory cues would instead signal that prey was immediately present, and result in longer visit and interaction durations because cats try to ascertain the prey location. Moreover, it was hypothesised that if cats use audio cues to hunt reptiles, they would be attracted to audio lures with low or mid-frequencies that mirror reptile vocalisations or movement sounds.
Methods
Feral cats, confined to a 20- × 20-m pen, were exposed to audio and olfactory lures consisting of novel, non-natural ‘beep’ sounds of different frequencies, pre-recorded prey animal sounds of different frequencies, or reptile-scented olfactory lures across three different experiments. Remote cameras recorded cat responses, which were later scored for the number and duration of proximity events, visits and interactions at lures.
Key results
As predicted, there was a trend towards a higher number of visits and interactions with olfactory lures than audio lures, whereas audio lures using real animal sounds, but not beep lures, tended to elicit longer interactions. Of the audio beep lures, those ~13 and 60 kHz resulted in more visits and interactions, whereas cats spent longer investigating lures of ~13 kHz.
Conclusions
Results suggest that olfactory cues may increase cat visitation rates to an area, whereas mid-range frequency animal sounds may increase visit durations.
Implications
Insights from this study can be used to guide cat-management strategies, particularly in the development of more effective lures.