This collared jaguar was among the animals followed in the international study on wildlife movement patterns.
Cats and dogs may share our homes, but their wild relatives have moved through the world very differently for tens of millions of years.
That’s one conclusion of a new study by a team of global researchers, including at UBC Okanagan, published today in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.
The research reveals that canids—wolves, coyotes and foxes—follow dense, predictable paths across their territories, while felids such as cougars, leopards and lynx tend to move in a more scattered way.
“Cats and dogs split into separate species about 45 million years ago, and they’ve never looked back,” says Dr. Michael Noonan, Assistant Professor of Biology at UBC Okanagan’s Biodiversity, Resilience and Ecosystem Services (BRAES) Institute. “We can still see that divergence in how they move through their environments today.”
The study analyzed GPS data from more than 1,200 animals across 34 species and six continents, using physics-based models to map “routeways,” or travel lines that animals reuse.
On average, canids displayed 15 to 33 per cent more routeways than felids, even when living in the same areas.
The differences may come from their diets, hunting styles and social behaviours. Canids often chase their prey, are omnivores and highly social, while felids hunt alone and are strict carnivores.
Those traits may also relate to another long-debated question: are dogs smarter than cats?
The short answer is no. The study wasn’t looking into intelligence in the modern understanding. Instead, the research supports long and poorly understood differences.
“We didn’t test intelligence directly, but the results line up with existing psychology research showing canids have stronger spatial working memory,” says Noonan. “It’s not that dogs are smarter overall—they just seem wired to remember and reuse travel routes, while cats navigate space differently.”
The project also highlights the collaborative and interdisciplinary strengths of UBC Okanagan researchers. Experts in biology, physics and statistics worked with more than 100 international partners, to create models that apply physics principles to wildlife movement.
UBC Okanagan researchers Dr. Karen Hodges, Full Professor of Conservation Biology, and PhD students Kristine Teichman and Siobhan Darlington also contributed to the study. Hodges specializes in wildfire, predators, species-at-risk, and habitat loss. Teichman led research on caracal (wild cats) in South Africa. Darlington leads research on cougar movement and foraging.
“As habitats are being lost around the world, studies such as this one also highlight that species behave very differently, which will make some more vulnerable than others to the same habitat loss,” Dr. Hodges says. “This kind of information will help us to make better conservation decisions.”
The findings carry clear conservation lessons. Canids’ reliance on predictable routes makes them more vulnerable to roads and barriers, but also more likely to benefit from wildlife crossings.
In contrast, felids’ diffuse movements make them harder to protect with a single structure, but it may also help them hunt better in their smaller home ranges.
“In British Columbia and Alberta, forestry and energy projects create roads and seismic lines that help canid movement, which can affect prey animals like caribou,” adds Dr. Adam Ford, Canada Research Chair in Wildlife Restoration Ecology at UBCO and a study co-author. “Understanding these patterns is essential for effective conservation planning.”
With GPS tracking often costing about $10,000 per animal, the project relied on a rare culture of global data sharing.
“This is another great example of how scientists in the Okanagan are helping answer global questions in animal movement,” Noonan adds. “By combining ecology with tools from physics, we can find patterns that apply across species, continents and millions of years of evolution.”
