Can we tell how big cats are doing by the number of wild dogs in the area?

[Sully]

Ancient cats drove ancient dogs to extinction 

The battle between cats and dogs goes back millions of years – and it looks like the cats won one of the early rounds.
During the Eocene Era, about 55.8-33.9 million years ago, mammal populations were exploding across the planet. The earliest primates had appeared just a few million years before and at their peak, about 30 different canine species roamed what is now North America. But according to a new study, most of these ancient dogs suddenly disappeared about 20 million years ago. The culprit? Early cats.

“While several groups of carnivores might have competed with dogs, felids [cats] are the groups that shows by far the strongest evidence of competition,” computational biologist and lead author Daniele Silvestro told Katherine Ellen Foley for Quartz via email.
To figure out exactly what caused these ancient canines to go extinct, Silvestro and his team looked at more than 2,000 fossils from all sorts of animals that lived in the same area from about 20-40 million years ago. The researchers compared the body types of carnivores like bears, wolves and big cats to see which animals might have directly competed for food at a time when the planet was undergoing severe climate change. According to Silvestro, ancient cats like the false-sabretooth cat fit the profile perfectly: they were about the same size as the canines, they ate the same food and were thriving and diversifying at the same time as the dogs rapidly disappeared from the fossil record, Foley writes.
Today, there are only about nine different dog species living in North America. Even though the planet’s climate was rapidly changing at the time, it appears that cats were just better predators than their rivals.

"We usually expect climate changes to play an overwhelming role in the evolution of biodiversity,” Silvestro said in a statement. “Instead, competition among different carnivore species proved to be even more important for canids.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-new...180956663/

The figure most often quoted is that 40 dog species in north America were driven to extinction by cats that came over from Asia. It is evident they can devastate the candid population, as we see in certain places today.

"The research finds that cats have played a significant role in making 40 dog species extinct, outcompeting them for scarce food supplies because they are generally more effective hunters. But researchers found no evidence that dogs have wiped out a single cat species."

https://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/cats-vs-dogs-scientists-confirm-that-felines-are-better-from-an-evolutionary-perspective-10454590.html Reply