It's always fun to learn about how animals learn, mate, hunt & play.

But for me, the animal-behavior research I'm most keen to write about is when peering into animal societies helps people figure out better ways to share limited lands.

Here's one case: https://apnews.com/article/africa-namibia-animals-7cee116171a793e37d7d6022ebcad069

Ecologist @joergmelzheimer and his colleagues put radio-collars on 106 cheetahs and followed their movements over 12 years in Namibia, mostly in 15-minute intervals. That's a lot of data! They wanted to understand how cheetahs relate to each other, and how they use the landscape.

Cheetahs are mostly asocial cats, but they aren't lonely.

The big cats spend much of their time alone, but they also frequently visit landmarks - trees or stones - to leave scent markings & sniff out who's been around recently. This is how they know who's ready to mate or fight.

“You can think of these landmarks as the most popular bar in town,” as Melzheimer explained. “It’s the main address for all the boys and girls looking for partners to go. It’s a communication hub” for cheetahs. Roar!

And these hubs - cheetah bars, if you will - are enduring.

Local ranchers recalling stories their own grandparents told helped researchers realize that some marking trees have been used by cheetahs for more than 80 years.

That's many, many, many cheetah generations ago.

The researched examined 12 years of location data and realized that cheetahs spend 20x more time in & around these communication hubs than they do elsewhere.

They mapped out precisely where these landmarks are in part of Namibia and shared the information with local ranchers.

The ranchers were skeptical at first, but eventually took the scientists' suggestion to avoid bringing their cattle near cheetah hotspots during calving season.

And the number of calves lost to cheetah predation went down, on average, from 15 to 2 annually.

That significant.

Cheetahs are Africa's rarest big cat, with less than 7,000 adults left in the wild.

They persist largely in open savannah areas, often used by cattle ranchers.

When cheetah kill calves, it creates conflicts with ranchers - and threatens their tolerance for cheetahs existence.