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Elusive wildcats may hold the key to healthier forests in Africa

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There’s a theory about what happens when a big cat sets up shop in a forest, and it’s at the center of one of the biggest fights in ecology today. The idea goes like this: when a predator, like a leopard, moves into a stretch of woodland, it starts preying on the smaller animals — in the case of a leopard, animals like bush pigs, deer and monkeys. In doing so, it creates what’s called a trophic cascade: more leopards lead to fewer plant- and seed-eating animals, allowing more plants and trees of certain species to make it to adulthood. Some theorize that even the smell of a predator makes herbivores more cautious (known as the ecology of fear), causing them to spend less time eating out in the open. A big cat may not even need to hunt to transform a forest. Sarah Tossens, a Ph.D. researcher at the University of Liège in Belgium, has set out to discover if this idea could be true for leopards (Panthera pardus) and African golden cats (Caracal aurata), a small forest cat found only in Central and West Africa. The golden cat is so elusive that it was only photographed in the wild for the first time in 2002. In attempting to reconstruct the food web in her study sites in the Republic of Congo and Cameroon, Tossens’s preliminary results suggest that wildcats potentially lead to higher seed germination. And her work is providing new information that could help protect these at-risk…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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