Among mammalian invaders, domestic carnivores, e.g., dogs ( Canis familiaris) and cats ( Felis catus), are reported to exert the most serious damage ( Van't Woudt, 1990 Doherty et al., 2016 Home et al., 2017). The impacts of feral pets include environmental/habitat alterations (e.g., rabbits: Flux and Fullagar, 1992 pigeons: Boano et al., 2019), predation of native fauna (e.g., cats: Loss et al., 2013 dogs: Doherty et al., 2017), hybridization with related wild species (e.g., ferrets: Davison et al., 1999 cats: Randi et al., 2001 dogs: Bassi et al., 2017), and disease transmission (e.g., ducks: Hinshaw et al., 1978 cats: Loss and Marra, 2017). The presence of domestic free-ranging animals may disrupt ecosystems or contribute to local extinction events ( Malo et al., 2011). By definition ( Wonham, 2006), domestic species should also be considered “alien” when they establish free-ranging populations in the wild outside their native range ( Carthey and Banks, 2012 Home et al., 2017 Boano et al., 2019). Biological invasions represent a serious threat to global biodiversity at all organization levels, from genes to ecosystems ( Wonham, 2006). Understanding the processes shaping ecological communities under multiple disturbances is a crucial challenge in ecology and conservation biology (e.g., Davis et al., 2000 Cilleros et al., 2016 Mazel et al., 2017). The mitigation of the impacts of domestic cats on wildlife requires dissemination projects promoting responsible cat ownership, as well as a restriction of free-ranging behavior, particularly at nighttime. We provided strong evidence that free-ranging domestic cats may seriously affect the conservation of threatened and non-threatened wildlife species, which are already suffering from population declines due to other causes, e.g., habitat loss. The use of a collar bell did not affect the predation rate of cats, and the number of prey items brought home decreased with increasing distance from the countryside. Thus, the largest impact was on the functional structure of mammal and bird communities. When considering this diet in functional trait space, we observed that the class occupying the largest functional space was that of birds, followed by mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. Birds and mammals such as passerines and rodents were reported to be the groups most commonly killed by free-ranging cats. Domestic cats may kill at least 207 species (2042 predation events) in Italy among those, 34 are listed as “Threatened” or “Near Threatened” by the IUCN and Italian Red Lists. We collected data on the impact of cats both through a citizen science approach (wildlife predations by 145 cats belonging to 125 owners) and by following 21 of these 145 cats for 1 year and recording all of the prey they brought home. In this work, we aimed at assessing the potential spectrum of wild vertebrates that may be killed by free-ranging domestic cats, and we considered our results within the context of their conservation status and IUCN threat category. In Italy, the European country that is richest in biodiversity, cats are very popular pets. This is particularly evident for island ecosystems, as data for mainland countries are often lacking.
6MUSE – Museo delle Scienze, Corso del Lavoro e della Scienza, Trento, Italy.5Società di Scienze Naturali del Verbano Cusio Ossola, Museo di Scienze Naturali, Collegio Mellerio Rosmini, Domodossola, Italy.4Associazione per la Divulgazione Ambientale e Scientifica, Dovadola, Italy.
3Dipartimento di Biologia, Università di Firenze, Sesto Fiorentino, Italy.2Institut de Biologia Evolutiva, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Cientificas - Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain.
1Dipartimento di Scienze della Vita, Università degli Studi di Siena, Siena, Italy.Emiliano Mori 1 * †, Mattia Menchetti 2,3 †, Alberto Camporesi 4, Luca Cavigioli 5, Karol Tabarelli de Fatis 6 and Marco Girardello 7
0 kommentar(er)
