A new Panthera study published today in Landscape Ecology has found that pumas might utilize a sly hunting strategy known as ‘garden to hunt,’ by which puma kills fertilize or deposit nutrients in soil that increase plant quality and attract ungulates to feed in select habitat conducive to future stalk-and-ambush puma hunting.
Study suggests pumas utilize sly strategy of fertilizing plants that recruit prey to hunting grounds
I sort of scoffed at the headline at first then I thought it was like how dead salmon fertilize a forest so not completely implausible. Their data is interesting and a tack on the ecology of predation. While they say that nutrients are being concentrated they are not pointing out that they are pulled from somewhere else and what that means. Nonetheless, it caught me off guard. It is good to be surprised.