Marking trees are important hotspots of communication for cheetahs: Here they exchange information with and about other cheetahs via scent marks, urine and scats. A team from the Cheetah Research Project of the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (Leibniz-IZW) now showed that several mammalian species on farmland in Namibia maintain a network for intra- and interspecific communication at cheetah trees. Black-backed jackals, African wildcats and warthogs visited and sniffed the cheetahs' “places to be” more frequently than control trees, the team concluded from photos and videos recorded by wildlife camera traps in a paper in the scientific journal “Mammalian Biology”. A common prey species of the cheetahs, however, avoided these hotspots. A territorial cheetah male scent...
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