Scientists Map the Navigation Styles of Wild Cats and Dogs—and Uncover Surprises

The next time you watch your dog sniff around the same places around your yard or notice that your cat seems to explore a new area every time it ventures outside, consider this: You might be witnessing an ancient evolutionary strategy in action. 

A new study published online Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences reveals that wild canids—wolves, foxes, coyotes and others—consistently create and stick to specific travel routes within their territories. But their distant carnivore cousins in the cat family—like bobcats, lions and leopards—tend to roam more freely, relying less strongly on favored routes. 

Led by University of Maryland researchers, the collaborative study used GPS collar data detailing the movements of 1,239 individual carnivores representing 34 species across six continents over the past decade—the largest comparative study of carnivore movement ecology ever conducted. It was funded by the U.S. National Science Foundation and German government science agencies.

“We found that carnivore species use space in fundamentally different ways,” said lead scientist William Fagan, a Distinguished University Professor of biology at UMD. “Members of the dog family appear much more structured in their uses of space. On average, they rely more heavily on favored travel routes compared to members of the cat family.”

The findings challenge scientists’ traditional understanding of the movement ecology of mammalian predators. Historically, researchers assumed that predators moved randomly throughout their territories, an assumption so widespread that it was baked into standard mathematical models.

However, the new findings show that many carnivores create invisible “highway” systems that they use repeatedly to move through portions of their home ranges, perhaps thanks in part to the dogs’ powerful sense of smell.

“Canids possess superior olfactory abilities compared to felids, potentially helping them establish and remember preferred travel routes,” Fagan said. “It looks like these different navigation strategies have developed over millions of years since dogs and cats last shared a common ancestor.” 

The magnitude and consistency of differences between the two predator groups are striking given the large, varied dataset, said senior author Justin M. Calabrese, head of the Earth System Science research group at CASUS in Germany and adjunct professor at UMD. 

Intriguingly, the differences between canids and felids actually became stronger when the researchers restricted their analyses to nine shared landscapes where they could be studied together, removing the influence of variation in vegetation type, human “footprints” and other factors, he said.

The findings have many implications for improving wildlife conservation and management practices, such as predicting human-wildlife encounters and organizing conservation areas— particularly in protecting endangered species from threats such as poachers, Fagan said.

He and his and collaborators recently held a workshop at UMD’s Brin Mathematics Research Center focusing on the links between movement, encounters, and the dynamics of disease transmission, mate-finding and predator-prey systems. The massive undertaking, which included 177 collaborators worldwide, heralds powerful new ways to study animal movement and ecology, Fagan said.

“The project demonstrated how modern GPS technology and sophisticated analysis methods developed by our research group can reveal fascinating hidden aspects of animal behavior that were impossible to study just a short time ago,” he said.