Cat Tracker

During this lab, we studied and recorded the different movements of 45 cats. We chose 15 from the US, 15 from Australia, and 15 from New Zealand. These different sets of data gave us a pretty good idea of the average ranges of cats. Our objective was to find the home range, or the physical area covered by an animal’s regular movements, of each cat. This is different from an animal’s territory. A territory is the area the animal defends, and is usually a smaller space inside the home range.

The website Movebank was used to get the ranges of each cat. It uses citizen scientists to retrieve data of all sorts of animals. They give the person a GPS tracker to attach to their cat for a specific amount of time, then store the data on their website. We exported the cat data from Movebank to Google Earth so we could calculate the home ranges.

Groups	Count	Sum	Average	Variance
US	15	103.4	6.893333	34.59638
AUS	15	64.3	4.286667	14.47838
NZ	15	57.6	3.84	18.66971
ANOVA
Source of Variation	SS	df	MS	F	P-value	F crit
Between Groups	81.58533	2	40.79267	1.806465	0.176762	3.219942
Within Groups	948.4227	42	22.58149
Total	1030.008	44

The above chart is the result of a one way ANOVA test. This test is used when you want to know if the groups being studied had significantly different data results. What is really important in this data table is the F value, the P value, and the F critical value. Because the F value is smaller than the critical value, we can conclude that there is no significant difference between the means of each country. Which simply means the averages are different because of the random sampling we performed with the Movebank website.

I expected the New Zealand cats to have the largest home ranges. However, they ended up being the smallest. Most of the cats tracked there were in urban areas, and most of the cats in the US were in rural areas. From this observation, we can see that cats in rural areas tend to utilize their landscapes more than urban cats. Rural cats know they can get food from other places besides their home territories, so it seems they prefer to explore their areas. Urban cats may find the odd meal here or there, but since they know there is guaranteed food at home, they tend to stick closer to there.

There is a downside to cats that stray from home, and that is a decrease in biodiversity. Everyone loves their furry friend, but nobody really takes the time to realize just how many small animals their pet is killing. Domesticated cats, our pets, have led to the extinction of about 63 species, (Loss & Marra, 2017).

Loss, S. R., & Marra, P. P. (2017, October 12). Population impacts of free‐ranging domestic cats on mainland vertebrates. Retrieved from https://esajournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1002/fee.1633