BrentD
Well-known member
Yeah, really.
Maybe no one will find this amusing or interesting, but I found a seminar today by Chris Wilmers of UC-Santa Cruz to be both.
I did not know of his work before this but it has some interesting aspects. He has been hanging very high end telemetry gear on big cats (mt. lions and leopards) and seeing what they do energetically and otherwise.
As part of a larger project, he did some audio playbacks to lions in the wild over their own kills. He tracked quite a few lions in California (remember CA has had no mountain lion hunting for multiple generations of lions, and that is important here). When the GPS collars indicate that a cat has made a kill, he waits for the cat to leave and then finds the kills and plants a few speakers around it with a video camera.
When the cat comes back, he plays different sounds. Things like really loud frog calls have no effect on the cat's feeding. Dogs barking have no effects either. But you cannot believe how fast a cat leaps out of the picture frame from even the first syllable of a Rush Limbaugh radio show. It is astonishing.
You may or may not be surprised that it leaves just as rapidly, even if far leftists, or GDI moderates are broadcast in the same way - it wasn't really about Rush after all. But truly these cats are scared of people - although they have not been hunted in early 30 yrs now.
There were a lot of other interesting tidbits. He finds an amazing amount of cats are traveling in very dense suburban/urban neighborhoods. One even killed a deer with a few meters of his office window. But just as interesting, such urban/suburban lions are also killing a lot MORE deer because they spend less time, much less time, feeding on each kill that they make. Looks like lions, not archers may be the solution to urban deer problems
He was really interested in the energetics of lion behavior in anthropogenic and more natural habitats and discovering how much additional energy the lions spend where human activity is high. It was quite a bit. Overall, an interesting talk with lots of intriguing details, but now I know the best defense against lion attack is a Rush podcast on my cell phone...
Maybe no one will find this amusing or interesting, but I found a seminar today by Chris Wilmers of UC-Santa Cruz to be both.
I did not know of his work before this but it has some interesting aspects. He has been hanging very high end telemetry gear on big cats (mt. lions and leopards) and seeing what they do energetically and otherwise.
As part of a larger project, he did some audio playbacks to lions in the wild over their own kills. He tracked quite a few lions in California (remember CA has had no mountain lion hunting for multiple generations of lions, and that is important here). When the GPS collars indicate that a cat has made a kill, he waits for the cat to leave and then finds the kills and plants a few speakers around it with a video camera.
When the cat comes back, he plays different sounds. Things like really loud frog calls have no effect on the cat's feeding. Dogs barking have no effects either. But you cannot believe how fast a cat leaps out of the picture frame from even the first syllable of a Rush Limbaugh radio show. It is astonishing.
You may or may not be surprised that it leaves just as rapidly, even if far leftists, or GDI moderates are broadcast in the same way - it wasn't really about Rush after all. But truly these cats are scared of people - although they have not been hunted in early 30 yrs now.
There were a lot of other interesting tidbits. He finds an amazing amount of cats are traveling in very dense suburban/urban neighborhoods. One even killed a deer with a few meters of his office window. But just as interesting, such urban/suburban lions are also killing a lot MORE deer because they spend less time, much less time, feeding on each kill that they make. Looks like lions, not archers may be the solution to urban deer problems
He was really interested in the energetics of lion behavior in anthropogenic and more natural habitats and discovering how much additional energy the lions spend where human activity is high. It was quite a bit. Overall, an interesting talk with lots of intriguing details, but now I know the best defense against lion attack is a Rush podcast on my cell phone...