Do dingoes suppress feral cats? Spatial and temporal activity of sympatric feral cats and dingoes in Central Queensland

Abstract

Predation by feral cats is considered to be the most significant factor in Australia’s recent mammal extinctions. Feral cats also threaten livestock, wildlife and human health by spreading diseases. Effective control of feral cats is difficult to achieve at the landscape scale using traditional management approaches such as trapping, shooting and exclusion. Dingoes may be a broad scale control of invasive mesopredators such as feral cats and foxes. Camera traps were used to investigate the spatial and temporal activity of dingoes and feral cats across two different land tenures. The presence and activity of cats were both unrelated to dingoes and models suggested that dingoes had no effect on the probability of cat presence on either land tenure. Contrary to predictions, the probability of detecting a cat was significantly higher in areas occupied by dingoes than in dingo-free areas, while dingoes had no effect on the detectability of cats on agricultural land. Feral cats and dingoes exhibited marked overlap in both spatial and temporal activity across both sites, indicating coexistence between these predators.