Integrating space, time, and prey: How wild and domestic carnivores co-exist in natural ecosystems

Abstract

As human activities increasingly encroach into natural ecosystems, it is critical to understand how carnivores coexist with anthropogenic disturbances, for example, the domestic dog (Canis lupus familiaris), which roams freely in natural habitats and represents a global conservation concern. Few studies have employed multi-faceted approaches to address this issue, limiting our understanding of carnivore coexistence mechanisms. We focused on the carnivores in the Tianshan Mountains of Central Asia to describe their multi-niche coexistence patterns, integrating dietary metabarcoding, multispecies occupancy modeling and temporal activity analysis. We found that snow leopards (Panthera uncia) and wolves (Canis lupus) showed high dietary, spatial, and temporal overlap, sharing preferences for ibex (Capra sibirica) and avoiding elk (Cervus canadensis). Dietary analysis revealed that domestic dogs shared prey preferences and exhibited high dietary overlap with both snow leopards and wolves. These results indicate that dogs may compete with both apex predators for resources, particularly wolves due to their high spatio-temporal overlap. The red fox (Vulpes vulpes) had lower dietary overlap with other carnivores due to lower reliance on large mammals, which were likely obtained through scavenging. This scavenging behavior was further supported by its tendency to spatially co-occur with large carnivores, especially snow leopards. Given its varied temporal overlaps with large carnivores, we demonstrated that its coexistence with them is facilitated by flexible resource use and temporal adaptations, rather than spatial segregation. These findings reveal carnivore coexistence despite disturbance from free-roaming dogs and underscore the need to enhance dog management for promoting human-wildlife coexistence in natural ecosystems.