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Follow the prey: How servals adapt to an industrialized landscape

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Why did the serval go to the petrochemical complex? For the refinery rodents, of course. These swift and slender wildcats that call the marshes and reedbeds of sub-Saharan Africa home have a penchant for rats and mice, though they’ll also feed on a mix of birds, insects and reptiles. But for their preferred prey, they’ll leave the relative safety of their wetland homes and venture into human-modified landscapes. That’s the finding from a new study in Mammalia, which shows servals will adapt accordingly, persisting almost solely on rats and mice at one of the world’s biggest petrochemical complexes. The number of servals at Sasol’s Secunda petrochemical complex in Mpumalanga, South Africa, has broken density records. Image courtesy of Loock et al. (2018). From specialization to adaptation The serval (Leptailurus serval) may be a specialist carnivore, highly skilled at hunting small animals in wetlands and savannas, but that doesn’t mean it can’t adapt when push comes to shove. “The anatomy, morphology, behavior and physiological adaptations of specialist carnivores allow them to find food efficiently and effectively,” said study lead author Fortune Ravhuanzwo, a conservation expert at South Africa’s University of Venda. Ravhuanzwo’s team revealed that a serval population was able to not only survive, but thrive, in the Sasol Secunda petrochemical industrial complex in South Africa’s northeastern province of Mpumalanga. By collecting 264 scat samples each year from 2013 to 2018, the scientists showed that even in this human-dominated landscape, the long-limbed cat remained a rodent specialist, with a preference for…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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