Conservation status of the dhole Cuon alpinus in north-east India, with a focus on Dampa Tiger Reserve, Mizoram
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Conservation status of the dhole Cuon alpinus in
north-east India, with a focus on Dampa Tiger
Reserve, Mizoram
P R I Y A S I N G H , A R J U N S R I V A T H S A and D A V I D W . M A C D O N A L D
Abstract Despite the efforts invested in their conservation, are a stronghold for the species (Acharya, ; Srivathsa
the status of many threatened carnivores in key conserva- et al., ; Punjabi et al., ), with the largest dhole popu-
tion landscapes remains unknown. The dhole Cuon alpinus lation (Kamler et al., ). However, the species has under-
is an Endangered social carnivore whose geographical gone local extirpation across parts of its former range as a
range has contracted by c. % since the early th century. result of declines of prey species, loss of habitat and, poten-
North-east India is a critical link between South Asian and tially, disease (Karanth et al., ; Srivathsa et al., ).
South-east Asian dhole populations. In this study we com- Information on dholes in north-east India in particular is
piled presence records of dholes across north-east India, limited (Gopi et al., ; Bashir et al., ; Lyngdoh
from multiple sources. We also conducted camera-trap et al., ), despite the fact that this landscape shares con-
surveys in one part of this region, Dampa Tiger Reserve tinuous forest with Myanmar and South-east Asia, forming
in the state of Mizoram. We examined the influence of an important part of the species' global range.
ecological and management factors on fine-scale site-use Current knowledge of dholes in north-east India is
by dholes in Dampa Tiger Reserve, showing a positive restricted to landscapes north of the River Brahmaputra
association of dhole site-use with sambar Rusa unicolor (Ginsberg & Macdonald, ). This is primarily because
encounters, distance to the forest boundary and presence of the paucity of baseline ecological data from the region,
of forest department personnel, underscoring the import- given its undulating terrain, difficulty of access, wet climatic
ance of prey and protection. Our findings also highlight conditions, and socio-political insurgencies. Here we pro-
the need for targeted, multi-scale assessments of dhole vide a compilation of dhole presence records from across
ecology across other sites in north-east India. north-east India using data extracted from multiple sources.
Using data from camera-trap surveys we examine factors
Keywords Camera traps, Cuon alpinus, distribution, dhole,
influencing fine-scale site-use by dholes in Dampa Tiger
Endangered, management, north-east India
Reserve, Mizoram State. We discuss the implications of
Supplementary material for this article is available at our results for dhole conservation in north-east India,
https://doi.org/./S where the focus of wildlife managers is directed mainly
towards population recoveries of and local recolonization
by the tiger Panthera tigris. We provide recommendations
T he dhole Cuon alpinus is an Endangered social carni-
vore found in forested landscapes of South and
South-east Asia. Historically widespread across Asia, the
for management interventions that could facilitate conser-
vation of dholes in this hitherto neglected landscape.
Dampa Tiger Reserve lies in the Indo-Myanmar Bio-
species’ range has contracted by c. % (Wolf & Ripple, diversity Hotspot (Mittermeier et al., ; Fig. ). The
). The current distribution extends across most of reserve is contiguous with the Chittagong Hill Tract region
South and South-east Asia and parts of China but is largely of Bangladesh to the west. The core area of the Reserve cov-
restricted to protected areas (Kamler et al., ). The pro- ers km, and the multi-use buffer covers an area of
tected forest landscapes south of the River Ganges in India km. The Lushai Hills traverse the reserve, with altitudes
of –, m. Mean annual rainfall is ,–, mm
(Islam & Rahmani, ). The Reserve supports a high di-
PRIYA SINGH Researchers for Wildlife Conservation, National Centre for versity of carnivores, including, in addition to the dhole,
Biological Sciences, GKVK Campus, Bengaluru, India four species of felids and two species of ursids (Singh &
ARJUN SRIVATHSA* (Corresponding author, orcid.org/0000-0003-2935-3857) Macdonald, ). In this study we also recorded the ele-
Department of Wildlife Ecology and Conservation, University of Florida, phant Elephas maximus, gaur Bos gaurus, sambar Rusa uni-
Gainesville, USA. E-mail asrivathsa@ufl.edu
color, red serow Capricornis rubidus, muntjac Muntiacus
DAVID W. MACDONALD Department of Zoology, Wildlife Conservation Research
muntjak and wild pig Sus scrofa.
Unit, Recanati-Kaplan Centre, University of Oxford, Tubney, Abingdon, UK
We compiled dhole presence records for nine north-
*Also at: School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Florida,
Gainesville, USA, and Wildlife Conservation Society–India, Bengaluru, India eastern states (Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, Manipur,
Received September . Revision requested November .
Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland, Sikkim, Tripura and
Accepted February . First published online October . West Bengal). We searched for records from onwards
Oryx, 2020, 54(6), 873–877 © 2019 Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319000255
Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 46.4.80.155, on 04 Mar 2022 at 01:18:41, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms.
https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605319000255874 P. Singh et al.
FIG. 1 North-east India, with Dampa
Tiger Reserve in Mizoram and locations
where the dhole Cuon alpinus has been
recorded, with corresponding reliability
scores (see text for details).
in newspaper reports, scientific articles, grey literature (in- matrix therefore contained non-detections and detections
cluding species checklists), and reports by forest department (coded as and , respectively) for sites (data from five
personnel, local informants and naturalists working in the sites could not be retrieved), with a varying number of
region. For each record we noted the type of evidence temporal replicates (– days).
(direct/indirect), date of sighting, administrative status of We used photo-capture frequencies of key prey species
location (protected/non-protected), and source person or (sambar n = , muntjac n = , wild pig n = ; predicted
reference. We assigned reliability scores for each record positive influence), distance to reserve boundary (predicted
(–; with being most reliable, and least reliable; positive influence), photo-capture frequencies of forest
Supplementary Table ). department personnel (predicted positive influence) and
From December to March , we deployed photo-capture frequencies of other humans (predicted
pairs of Cuddeback Ambush IR camera traps (Model ; negative influence) as factors likely to influence site-use by
Cuddeback, De Pere, USA) across km in the north-east dholes. We used trap effort (number of days a trap station
of Dampa Tiger Reserve’s core area. At each station we was active) at each site as a covariate for detection probabil-
placed two cameras facing each other, c. cm above the ity, predicting that higher effort would translate to higher
ground, on either side of forest trails or on riverbeds detectability. We tested singular and additive effects of
(Singh & Macdonald, ). Mean inter-trap distance was the covariates, in which each represented an ecologically
. ± SD . km, with traps remaining active for an average plausible hypothesis. Covariates were checked for cross-
of days (range –; Singh & Macdonald, ). Although correlations and z-transformed prior to analyses. Models
the stations were intended to photograph wild felids, they were ranked using Akaike information criterion corrected
also photographed other carnivores. Dholes generally use for small sample sizes (AICc; Burnham & Anderson, ).
forest trails and riverbeds for movement, marking territories Parameter estimation and model comparisons were calcu-
and hunting, and our sampling design therefore incorpo- lated with PRESENCE . (Hines, ).
rated areas used by the species. We obtained presence records from locations for
We examined site-use patterns through an occupancy ap- –, of which we considered records from –
proach that accounted for imperfect detection (MacKenzie with reliability scores of – (Supplementary Table ).
et al., ). We treated each station as a site, and each In the case of multiple records for the same site, we consid-
trap-day as an independent temporal replicate. During ered the most recent record with the highest reliability
exploratory analyses we calculated Moran’s I to check score. Most records were from Arunachal Pradesh (n = )
for spatial dependence of detections. Spatial dependence and Assam (n = ), with five records from Mizoram and
dropped beyond . km, with , % of distance-pairs falling Nagaland, four from West Bengal, three from Meghalaya
within the first distance class (Supplementary Fig. ). We and two from Sikkim. There were no recent records of
considered this to be negligible with respect to the total dholes from Manipur and Tripura. A total of , camera
number of trap stations and detections, and therefore trap-days in Dampa Tiger Reserve generated photo-
treated each station as an independent site. The detection encounters of dholes, comprising detections (one per
Oryx, 2020, 54(6), 873–877 © 2019 Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319000255
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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605319000255Dhole in north-east India 875
TABLE 1 The top-ranked models (based on AICc scores) and the intercept-only model [psi(.), p(.)] for the probability of site-use by dholes
in Dampa Tiger Reserve, Mizoram during December –March .
Model1 AICc ΔAICc AICc weight Model likelihood Parameters Deviance
psi(sbr + fdp + bdy),p(eff) 862.47 0 0.4041 1 6 850.47
psi(sbr + fdp),p(eff) 863.24 0.77 0.2750 0.6805 5 853.24
psi(sbr + fdp + bdy + hum),p(eff) 863.98 1.51 0.1899 0.4700 7 849.98
psi(sbr),p(eff) 867.29 4.82 0.0363 0.0898 4 859.29
psi(sbr + bdy),p(eff) 867.74 5.27 0.0290 0.0717 5 857.74
psi(sbr + pig),p(eff) 868.28 5.81 0.0221 0.0547 5 858.28
psi(sbr + hum),p(eff) 868.32 5.85 0.0217 0.0537 5 858.32
psi(sbr + pig + mjk),p(eff) 870.24 7.77 0.0083 0.0205 6 858.24
psi(fdp + bdy),p(eff) 870.74 8.27 0.0065 0.0160 5 860.74
psi(bdy),p(eff) 873.22 10.75 0.0019 0.0046 4 865.22
psi(fdp),p(eff) 873.55 11.08 0.0016 0.0039 4 865.55
psi(.),p(.) 874.19 11.72 0.0012 0.0029 2 870.19
sbr, sambar encounter frequency; fdp, encounters of forest department personnel; bdy, distance to reserve boundary; eff, trap effort; hum, human activity;
pig, wild pig encounter frequency; mjk, muntjac encounter frequency.
There are records of dholes across several areas of
north-east India, including in unprotected areas. Previous
global assessments indicated that the species faced near
or complete local extirpation to the south of the River
Brahmaputra (Ginsberg & Macdonald, ), contrary to
our findings from Dampa Tiger Reserve. Corroborating cur-
rent knowledge from other landscapes, we found a positive
relationship between dhole site-use and sambar presence
(Acharya, ; Andheria et al., ; Punjabi et al., ).
Across their extant distribution, the range of dholes overlaps
with that of tigers and leopards Panthera pardus. Wildlife
managers in this region and elsewhere subscribe to unsub-
FIG. 2 Estimates of probabilities of site-use (psi) by dholes in stantiated notions that dhole presence impedes colonization
Dampa Tiger Reserve (Fig. ) during December –March by tigers (P. Singh, pers. comm.), and consequently treat
, based on camera-trap surveys and occupancy modelling. dholes as a problem species. On the contrary, tigers,
leopards and dholes can exist provided protected areas
hour duration) across sites. Using the top-ranked support adequate densities of medium- to large-sized prey
occupancy model (Table ), we estimated mean site-use species (Karanth et al., ).
probability to be psi = . ± SE . (Fig. ) and trap-level Dampa Tiger Reserve is an important refuge for dholes
detectability to be P = . ± SE .. The top three models in north-east India. It supports large tracts of inviolate pro-
received similar support based on AICc scores; we interpret tected spaces, and habitat connectivity with forested land-
the covariate effects on probability of site-use from these scapes of the Chittagong Hill Tract region to the west,
models. Sambar encounters, forest department personnel Mamit Forest Division to the north and Thorangtlang
encounters and distance to reserve boundary had positive Wildlife Sanctuary to the south. Our camera-trap data
effects on probability of site-use by dholes (Table , indicate the presence of a guild of large herbivores in
Fig. ). The slope coefficient associated with effort as a the Reserve, with at least five prey species of medium
covariate for detectability was positive (mean = . ± SE .). and large ungulate herbivores, facilitating the long-term
TABLE 2 Slope coefficient estimates ± SE for ecological and management covariates for the top three models (i.e. those with AICc scores , ;
Table ) influencing site-use by dholes in Dampa Tiger Reserve, Mizoram during December –March .
Model1 sbr fdp bdy hum
psi(sbr + fdp + bdy),p(eff) 1.35 ± 0.59 0.86 ± 0.45 0.54 ± 0.34
psi(sbr + fdp),p(eff) 1.36 ± 0.55 0.76 ± 0.42
psi(sbr + fdp + bdy + hum),p(eff) 1.29 ± 0.58 1.12 ± 0.72 0.51 ± 0.34 −0.54 ± 0.84
sbr, sambar encounter frequency; fdp, encounters of forest department personnel; bdy, distance to reserve boundary; hum, human activity.
Oryx, 2020, 54(6), 873–877 © 2019 Fauna & Flora International doi:10.1017/S0030605319000255
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https://doi.org/10.1017/S0030605319000255876 P. Singh et al.
FIG. 3 The effect of (a) sambar Rusa
unicolor encounter frequency, (b) forest
department staff encounter frequency,
(c) distance to reserve boundary, and
(d) other human encounter frequency on
the probability of site-use by dholes in
Dampa Tiger Reserve during December
–March . Grey lines indicate %
confidence intervals.
persistence of dholes there. Our findings re-emphasize the Ethical standards This research abided by the Oryx guidelines on
importance of protected areas, which can serve as source ethical standards. Data on presence records were obtained from
published literature, media reports, and a network of researchers and
sites for sustaining dhole populations across the region.
naturalists who agreed to share information. All necessary research
In areas with low prey densities, carnivores may have permits for camera-trap surveys were obtained from the State Forest
significant dependence on livestock (Khorozyan et al., Department of Mizoram.
), and are consequently stigmatized. There is a strong
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