Abstract
The fishing cat’s persistence in a ‘semi-aquatic niche’ suggests the evolution of a successful hunting strategy. We describe it for the first time by analysing 197 camera-trap video-clips, collected from a participatory-science initiative, within an ethogram framework. The cats spent ∼52% of the time sitting and waiting for prey (fishes) to come nearer and took limited attempts to hunt (3.89%) in deeper waters (in which the upper portions of the cat’s body were submerged), where its hunting success was found to be 42.86%. In shallow waters, it adopted a predominantly active mode of hunting (∼96%) to flush out prey.
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to acknowledge all participants of the ‘Know Thy Neighbours’ program – a participatory science initiative funded by Wildlife Trust of India, Wildlife Conservation Trust and Mohamed Bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund (162513804). We would especially like to thank Subrata Maity, Anil Maity, Bappa Malik, Maidul Islam Khan, Joydeb Pradhan, Sudhin Adhikari, Indrajit Adak, Saswat Pati, Sourav Pati, Baraju Behera and his team members from Ma Pakshi Suraksha Samity and members of Mahavir Pakshi Suraksha Samity whose enthusiastic participation is especially mention worthy. We would also like to thank Iravatee Majgaonkar, Partha Dey and Dr Ajith Kumar for their vital inputs in developing the manuscript. A special thanks to Dr. Kulbhushansingh Suryawanshi who asked a question, during a discussion over the preliminary findings of the study, which piqued us to re-look at our analysis and discover aspects that excited us. Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewer for comments on our manuscript to help improve the same.
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Author contributions: Conceptualisation: Tiasa Adhya, Divyajyoti Ganguly; methodology: Tiasa Adhya, Divyajyoti Ganguly; formal analysis and investigation: Divyajyoti Ganguly; writing – original draft preparation: Divyajyoti Ganguly, Tiasa Adhya; funding acquisition: Tiasa Adhya; resources: Tiasa Adhya; supervision: Tiasa Adhya.
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Research funding: Mohamed Bin Zayed Species Conservation Fund (162513804), Wildlife Trust of India and Wildlife Conservation Trust.
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Conflict of interest statement: The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest regarding this article.
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Data accessibility statement: The data have been archived at an online repository since acceptance of the manuscript. Link for archived data: https://figshare.com/s/78515a99315b7c2cb46b.
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Research ethics: Not applicable.
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Supplementary Material
The online version of this article offers supplementary material (https://doi.org/10.1515/mammalia-2020-0133).
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