Endangered Asiatic wild dogs in central India almost entirely eat wild prey, even where they overlap with livestock, according to a recent study. The findings show that maintaining healthy wild prey populations is key to conserving the species, reports contributor Rajeev Tyagi for Mongabay India. The study, led by the National Centre for Biological Sciences (NCBS) in Bengaluru and the Maharashtra Forest Department, analyzed the feces or scat of dholes or Asiatic wild dogs (Cuon alpinus) inside the Tadoba-Andhari Tiger Reserve in the state of Maharashtra. Instead of scooping up entire piles of dhole scat, forest staff and researchers collected only small pinches of material during the monsoon and winter of 2022-2023. Researchers then used a method called DNA metabarcoding to analyze what the dholes had eaten. It’s a technique that extracts genetic material from fecal samples and matches it against a massive reference database containing information from tens of thousands of species. Traditional methods for analyzing carnivore diets rely on microhistology — examining prey hairs found in animal feces of scat under a microscope. But this method is vulnerable to observer bias, said study co-author and molecular ecologist Abhinav Tyagi. “Different people can categorise hair differently, and it induces a human or an observer’s bias,” Tyagi said. Arjun Srivathsa, a wildlife biologist affiliated with the Wildlife Conservation Society – India and not involved in the study, said that traditional methods are also prone to errors like misidentification of species or non-detection of certain species. However, the DNA barcoding method…This article was originally published on Mongabay

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