Original title: Fear of humans mediates spatiotemporal interactions between endangered large Asian felids
Jiawei Feng, Dawei Wang, Zhilin Li, Xintong Wei +2 · October 2026
Scientists tracked tigers and leopards using camera traps across hundreds of forest locations in northeast China. When humans enter the forest during the day, tigers adjust by shifting their activity into the night. This schedule change reduces the time tigers overlap with both leopards and their normal prey. Leopards face pressure from both people and dominant tigers, so they respond by moving their territories elsewhere. Foot traffic alone changes when and where these large cats hunt and live.
You and a coworker might take turns using a small shared office, timing your hours so you stay out of each other's way. If a loud manager regularly shows up in the afternoon, your coworker might decide to work entirely at night instead. Here, tigers adapt to daytime human foot traffic by moving only after dark, which throws off their hunting schedules and forces leopards to abandon those spaces entirely to stay safe.
When people enter wild forests, top predators do not simply run away; they alter how they live alongside one another. Tigers shift their hunting hours to the dark to avoid humans, which disrupts their overlap with prey, while leopards must abandon shared areas to avoid both tigers and people. Protecting endangered carnivores requires understanding how human presence quietly rearranges entire food webs.
The abstract doesn't say whether these behavioral shifts reduce hunting success, birth rates, or long-term survival for either species, as the study is bounded by two years of camera trap data in a temperate forest in northeast China.
Ask anything about this paper. Answers come from its abstract, and say so when the abstract doesn't cover your question.
Fear of humans mediates spatiotemporal interactions between endangered large Asian felids — Jiawei Feng, Dawei Wang, Zhilin Li et al. — Proceedings of the Royal Society B Biological Sciences — doi:10.1098/rspb.2026.1232
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.