Cats are moody.
In the blink of an eye, a cat can change from aloof to
affectionate, playful to predatory, carefree to curious. The myth about nine
lives is oddly suitable, but not as nine sequential lives. Instead, it is as
though cats have nine personalities which results in living nine lives all at
once.
Now their multifaceted personalities make us laugh with
LOL Cats.
But the joke is on us. Pet cats remain a mystery living
right under our noses. We share our homes with them. We adopt them into our
families. And if we let them outside, then there is a significant part of their
lives for which we are clueless. Curled up on our laps rests Dr. Jekyll, but out
the door goes a stalking Mr. Hyde.
A new collaboration
between cat owners and scientists seeks to find out where cats go and what they
may eat along the way. The scientists of Cat Tracker are a
team of professors and students at the NC Museum of Natural
Sciences, in NCSU Biological Science (Your Wild Life), and
at the NCSU
Veterinary School. The cat owners so far are mostly in North
Carolina, though recruits are now signing up from many other states, and soon
in Australia and New Zealand.
Cat owners outfit their pet with a tiny satellite
tracking device on a special collar. Undergraduate Troi Perkins programs the
GPS units, fits them into cases that she makes on a 3-D printer, and then
visits owners and helps “harness the little fuzz balls.” People outside of the
Raleigh area participate in a
Do-It-Yourself (DIY) style in four
easy steps.
Together, a GPS unit and harness costs about $50. Each
cat wears the gear for about a week. Then, while their pets feign innocence
upon return from numerous excursions that week, the owners remove the collar,
attach the GPS unit to their computer, and download the secrets movements of
the silent footed. The cat owners submit the tracking information to a public
data repository on animal movements, called Movebank. Until
now, Movebank was only used by professional researchers. With members of the
public engaging in animal tracking, the amount of information will quickly
rise.
Some participants opt to go one step further in their
desire to understand their cat companion. They divert the contents of the
litter box from the garbage to specimen cups picked up by the NCSU researchers.
These fecal samples will be examined for microbes and DNA from the potential
remains of wildlife.
To date, Cat Trackers has gathered data on the movement
of over 40 cats. Their goal is to track 1,000 cats.
Troi says she most commonly hears Cat Tracker
participants say, “Oh my… my cat has traveled over the highway?!” She explains
that people are usually surprised by their cat’s outdoor explorations and
curious to know whether their cat is a loner or hanging out with their
neighbor’s cats. She says, owners “just want to see if their cats are crossing
busy roads, visiting other people’s houses, or going into remote wooded areas.”
Researchers wonder similar things, particularly about
visits to wooded areas. Cats are not necessarily as benign as their purring
might make us believe. Cats transmit diseases to humans. Cats eat birds and
other wildlife. A study by Smithsonian and US Fish & Wildlife Service
researchers gave estimates that cats kill at a
minimum of one million birds and seven million small mammals every year.
Roland Kays, Director of the Biodiversity Lab at
the NC Museum of Natural Science explained that tracking at least a thousand
cats will reveal secrets “not only about the typical cat movements, but also
about the extraordinary ones. Given that cats are so common in the
country, if even 5% of them are moving out into the nature preserves it could
be quite harmful to native wildlife.”
Rob Dunn of NCSU’s Your Wild Life explained that “the big
result so far is that there are a lot of cats that walk short distances most
days and then every so often, for whatever reason, bolt for it often up to a
mile before coming right back And then a few cats just seem lost.” On the Cat
Tracker website, the cat movements look like starburst pattern in every direction around
their home.
As residential areas expand adjacent to natural areas,
and become increasingly important for biodiversity conservation and for human
wellbeing, conflicts between bird-lovers and cat-lovers escalate. Perhaps more
information can help find common ground.
It was over 9,000 years ago when our ancestors started
taming nature. First we learned how to turn wild plants into crops. We stored
the harvest, but this brought mice. So then, in the Near East, people
domesticated cats to function as mousers. We turned wild cats into pets. We’ve
bred them to be fluffy and leisurely, yet fierce and playful. Siamese, Tabby,
Calico. Their appearances are as different as their personalities. Lions
congregate together in prides. House cats simply have pride. An over-abundance
of it.
All of our pet cats retain their heritage, balancing a
dual identity of being a little wild, a little tame. Cat Tracker provides an
in-depth peek into the behaviors of cats, whether predatory, social, or
antisocial. Dunn told me that one household with nine cats just signed up. As
more owners with multiple cats participate, perhaps we’ll gain insight into the
idiom about herding cats and finally come to grips with the futile attempts to
control this chaotic group.
The entire article (with images) can be found at: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/citizen-science-salon/2014/07/25/cat-tracker/
No comments:
Post a Comment