Water is vital for mammals. Yet, as ephemeral sources can be difficult to find, it raises the question, how do mammals locate water? Elephants (Loxodonta africana) are water-dependent herbivores that possess exceptional ...

Alarm calls and predator vocalizations convey information on predator presence and potential risk. Generally, prey employ anti-predator behaviours more in response to alarm calls. However, occasionally prey respond more ...

Effective monitoring programmes are critical to understand and mitigate declining wildlife populations. In South Africa, the majority of oribi antelope (Ourebia ourebi ourebi) occur on private rangelands as broadly distributed ...

The functional response describes how food abundance affects the intake rate of foraging individuals, and as such, it can influence a wide range of ecological processes. In social species, dominance status can affect the ...

Many studies on the coexistence of wildlife with livestock have focused primarily on similarsized species. Furthermore, many of these studies have used dietary overlap as a measure of potential competition between interacting ...

Migratory animals often use environmental cues to time their seasonal migrations. Local conditions may, however, differ from distant ones, and current conditions may poorly predict future conditions. This may be particularly ...

African savanna elephants use pre-ingestive olfactory cues when making dietary choices, and previous research has observed that elephant diet choice is negatively correlated with vegetation species that contain high ...

In Africa, nothing inspires fear more than lions. They are large, hunt in groups and kill prey much larger than themselves. Yet, evidence suggests that African wildlife are more afraid of humans than anything else that ...

Although observed in other Perrisodactyla, urine overmarking in white rhinos has not been described. Using a single opportunistic sighting, we were able to collect two dung samples from one oestrous female white rhino; one ...

Group size and competition are key drivers of foraging behaviour in social animals. With seasonal changes in food quality and availability, comes changes in the type (scramble or interference) and degree of competition ...