Wild dogs record 2,500-mile trek across Africa in search of a mate

ByHelen Briggs Environment correspondent.

Key points

• A pack of African wild dogs has completed a record-breaking 2, 485-mile (4000km) journey throughout the continent.
• African wild dogs are among Africa's rarest predators, with only regarding 6, 000 remaining in the wild.
• Professor Scott Creel of Montana State University, the paper's lead author.
• The three brothers zigzagged throughout Zambia, navigating a landscape increasingly shaped by residents and avoiding obstacles including major cities.
• Perhaps even more significant than the distance itself was the route the wild dogs took through Zambia.

For context, a pack of African wild dogs has completed a record-breaking 2, 485-mile (4000km) journey throughout the continent.

Scientists say it is the furthest recorded distance for any African land mammal searching for a mate, offering hope that wildlife can travel throughout vast distances despite growing human pressures.

For context, the three brothers zigzagged throughout Zambia, navigating a landscape increasingly shaped by residents and avoiding obstacles including major cities.

Nevertheless, other wild dogs tracked with GPS collars in the study died in illegal snares, underlining the dangers they face.

Three sisters almost completed an equally epic journey, but halted when one became trapped in a snare.

They live in highly social packs, hunt together and are known for their vast roaming in search of new territory and breeding opportunities with other packs.

They cannot breed within the pack they are born into, so they either wait and may eventually inherit their pack, or set off at the age of two or three in search of a mate.

In practice, the brothers covered regarding 260 miles in a straight line over the course of eight months, but travelled almost 10 times that overall while crossing through a broken-up landscape.

These sorts of journeys are known as dispersals – travelling one way in search of a mate. It is a behaviour distinct from migrations, where animals move back and forth with the seasons in search of food or habitat.

In practice, the UN Convention on Migratory Species identifies Africa's longest migrations as wildebeest moving seasonally between Tanzania and Kenya in search of grazing and water covering more than 400 miles.

While grey wolves have been recorded travelling more than 4, 350 miles over a year, globally, caribou undertake the longest single land migrations of any animal – travelling 839 miles in a round trip.

They moved between wildlife strongholds, skirting areas containing major human obstacles, including the capital, Lusaka, and heavily developed industrial areas.

In practice, the findings suggest wild dog populations throughout eastern and southern Africa may remain more connected than conservationists previously believed.

Professor Scott Creel of Montana State University, the paper's lead author. This person has been studying African wild dogs since 1991, remarked the study provides cautious optimism.

"It's plausible to believe that every major wild dog population in eastern and southern Africa, other than fenced ones, are potentially connected, " he remarked.

But he remarked, in conservation, "the glass is half empty and the glass is half full", highlighting the threat of poaching snares.

While the three male wild dogs successfully completed their extraordinary journey, two of the three females died.

Researchers identified a pattern in which surviving pack members repeatedly returned to the same location, a behaviour that often signals the death of a companion.

In practice, the research, published in the journal, Ecology, external, adds weight to calls to create strips of natural land outside protected areas that connect separate wildlife areas broken apart by roads, towns, or farms.

Bruce Ellender, one of the paper's co-authors and Kafue Conservation director for the environmental charity, The Nature Conservancy, remarked species that roam over substantial areas, such as wild dogs and elephants, need connected landscapes if they are to survive into the future.

"We can't see these protected areas as islands and expect them to be functional in the long term, we need to think much broader than that, " he remarked.

For now, wild dogs record 2, 500-mile trek across Africa in search of a mate remains the part of the story worth watching, and further updates are likely as more details are confirmed.