One of the world’s smallest wild felines has been studied using GPS tracking collars for the first time, revealing new details of their secret lives.
Scientists in Saudi Arabia fitted collars to six sand cats, the only cat to live all year round in a desert environment, in the Prince Mohammed Bin Salman Royal Reserve.
“Tracking data show that individuals travel considerable distances at night [the species is strictly nocturnal], on average 6km, with one individual ranging almost 9km a night,” says reserve CEO Andrew Zaloumis.
"Males appear to hold large, sometimes overlapping territories, while females use multiple dens across wide areas,” he adds.
Sand cats are found in and around North Africa’s Sahara Desert, parts of the Arabian Peninsula and into Iran, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan, some of the hottest and driest regions on the planet. Small rodents are their primary prey but there are records of them hunting birds such as desert larks and small reptiles such as geckos and even snakes.
Known in Bedouin folklore as the ‘ghosts of the desert’, sand cats leave no tracks because of their fur-covered foot pads and have a distinctive avoidance behaviour which involves crouching low and closing their eyes when a light is shone on them, making it harder to pick them out.
The study also carried out analysis of the sand cat’s genome that has reinforced recent thinking that there are two subspecies, rather than four as previously understood, and revealed relatively low genetic variation in the reserve’s population.
“For a wide-ranging desert carnivore, this highlights the importance of connectivity,” says Zaloumis. “Large landscapes alone do not guarantee long-term resilience if populations remain isolated.”
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Previous research carried out further south in Saudi Arabia’s Empty Quarter using camera-traps generated 1,500 images of the species distributed across an area of 2,400km2. It found sand cats using all the major habitats, including sand dunes, interdunal gravel valleys and escarpment plateaus.
Sand cats are uniquely adapted for desert life. They obtain all the water they need from what they eat, and their large ears enable them to detect the faint sounds of rodents, reptiles and even insects moving beneath the surface of the sand.
“In the face of climate change and desertification, it is an important indicator of how biodiversity can persist or fail in rapidly changing extreme environments,” says the reserve.
Top image: sand cat. Credit: Prince Mohammed bin Salman Royal Reserve
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