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Feeding behaviour of red fox and domestic cat populations
in suburban areas in the south of Paris
Irene Castañeda
1,2
&Diane Zarzoso-Lacoste
2,3
&Elsa Bonnaud
2
#Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract
Among medium-sized carnivores, red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) and domestic cats (Felis silvestris catus) are the most abundant
species in human-dominated landscapes worldwide. Both are known to be generalist predators that exploit a wide range of prey
groups (e.g., mammals, birds, and invertebrates). Identifying red fox and domestic cat predation pressure on shared prey could
shed light on their ecological role in shaping wildlife communities in human-dominated landscapes. Here, we assess the seasonal
diet of red foxes and domestic cats in terms of composition, breadth, and overlap. Over two years, we collected their scats across
three human-dominated study sites:park (n= 220 for foxes and n=0forcats),agriculturalland(n= 159 for foxes and n= 146 for
cats), and managed forest (n= 169 for foxes and n= 47 for cats). We detected similar diet breadth (B) for red foxes and domestic
cats (B = 0.32 and B = 0.36, respectively) as well as strong dietary overlap (O = 0.83) between them. Moreover, the diet com-
position of both predators varied according to the study sites and seasons. Our results confirm the highly flexible trophic
behaviour of these carnivores at the study sites, probably as a consequence of prey availability, and also the simultaneity of their
predation over the same prey groups. Future studies should simultaneously monitor predator diet as well as predator and prey
abundance in human-dominated landscapes to better understand the predatory impact of red foxes and domestic cats.
Keywords Diet breadth .Diet overlap .Domestic cat .Red fox .Human-dominated landscapes
Introduction
By 2050, more than half of the world’s population will live in
urbanized areas (United Nations 2019). Consequently, under-
standing the functioning of these ecosystems is necessary in
order to preserve both biodiversity and human life quality.
Human-dominated landscapes share a set of general biotic
and abiotic characteristics such as the alteration of species
richness (McKinney 2008), the variation of microclimatic
conditions (Santamouris et al. 2001), the availability of new
resources such as anthropogenic food refuse (Fleming and
Bateman 2018), and the lack or reduced number of large car-
nivores (Crooks 2002; Iossa et al. 2010; Bateman and Fleming
2012). In this context, medium-sized carnivores may be “re-
leased”in the absence of top-predators (Crooks and Soulé
1999), thus influencing prey populations through top-down
processes, as already demonstrated at continental (Ripple
et al. 2013) and local scales (Jiménez et al. 2019).
Among medium-sized carnivores, the red fox (Vulpe s
vulpes) is one of the most widespread species (Schipper
et al. 2008), while the domestic cat (Felis silvestris catus)is
one of the most popular pets worldwide. Out of 18.83 million
pets in France, 11.4 million are cats. Moreover, the generalist
trophic behaviour of red foxes and domestic cats makes them
successful species in human-dominated landscapes (Bateman
and Fleming 2012). Red fox diets in urban areas are mostly
characterized by the presence of anthropogenic food refuse
(Harris 1981; Doncaster et al. 1990; Contesse et al. 2004;
Hegglin et al. 2007;Meckstrothetal.2007), while in rural
areas, they are more diversified with mammals and birds
Electronic supplementary material The online version of this article
(https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-020-00948-w) contains supplementary
material, which is available to authorized users.
*Irene Castañeda
irene.castanedagonz@gmail.com
1
Centre d’Ecologie et des Sciences de la Conservation (CESCO,
UMR 7204), Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, CNRS, Sorbonne
Université, 57 rue Cuvier, 75005 Paris, France
2
Ecologie Systématique et Evolution, Université Paris-Saclay, CNRS,
AgroParisTech, 91405 Orsay, France, Université Paris-Saclay,
91405 Orsay, France
3
Unité “Ecologie et Dynamique des Systèmes Anthropisés”
(UMR7058 CNRS), Université de Picardie Jules Verne, 1 rue des
Louvels, 80037 Amiens Cedex 1, France
https://doi.org/10.1007/s11252-020-00948-w
Published online: 21 February 2020
Urban Ecosystems (2020) 23:731–743
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