This is Scientific American's 60-second Science, I'm Jason Goldman.The cheetah is the rarest big cat in Africa.Less than 7,000 adults remain on the planet.Think of it this way: for every cheetah on the planet, there are more than four Starbucks coffee shops.The most important cheetah stronghold is in Central Namibia.But the cheetahs there don’t live within national parks.They live on privately owned farmland.“There were farmers having huge problems with cheetahs, losing a lot of livestock, and there were other farmers who actually didn’t have any problem at all.”Ecologist Joerg Melzheimer from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin assumed, at first, that all farmers had cheetah trouble.It was just that some were more likely to complain about it.But after tracking 50 collared cheetahs, he began to suspect that there really was a pattern to their killing.By the time his team had data from 106 cheetahs, collared over the course of a decade, not only was he certain that cheetahs were more likely to kill in some places than in others but that he could solve the problem.“We indeed found these communication hubs of cheetahs, which are spread evenly across the landscape with a high activity of cheetahs within the hubs.”Cheetahs are an asocial species, but they still need to trade information.“They don’t meet physically―typically not.
