Coursing hyenas and stalking lions: The potential for inter- and intraspecific interactions

Nancy A. Barker; Francois G. Joubert; Marthin Kasaona; Gabriel Shatumbu; Vincent Stowbunenko; Kathleen A. Alexander; Rob Slotow; Wayne M. Getz

doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0265054

Peer Review History

Original SubmissionFebruary 21, 2022
30 May 2022 Decision Letter - Marco Apollonio, Editor PONE-D-22-05250Coursing hyenas and stalking lions: the potential for inter- and intraspecific interactionsPLOS ONE Dear Dr.Baker Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process. The referee and I completely agree on the merit of your work and I think that after revising the text following the main advice to simplify presentation trough the use of tables your work will be suitable for publication. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jul 14 2022 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. 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Please note that supplementary tables (should remain/ be uploaded) as separate "supporting information" files. 6. Please review your reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. If you have cited papers that have been retracted, please include the rationale for doing so in the manuscript text, or remove these references and replace them with relevant current references. Any changes to the reference list should be mentioned in the rebuttal letter that accompanies your revised manuscript. If you need to cite a retracted article, indicate the article’s retracted status in the References list and also include a citation and full reference for the retraction notice. [Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.] Reviewers' comments: Reviewer's Responses to Questions Comments to the Author 1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions? The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented. Reviewer #1: Yes ******** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available? The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English? PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here. Reviewer #1: Yes ****** 5. Review Comments to the Author Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: I really liked your paper and feel it presents really important information from a great dataset and hence recommended minor revisions. That said, it was a pretty tough read - very long and filled with data that I think would be better served being presented as tables or figures (I realise there are a lot of these already - but they help your audience out a lot). I think this would help with the flow of the manuscript also. Hence, my big suggestion would be to try to move some of the Results text into tables, and abbreviate the manuscript wherever you can. Specific suggestions: - L61: I'd argue that these species 'preferentially' forage on different types of food, but opportunism masks these trends to a degree (Hayward, M. W. and Kerley, G. I. H. 2008. Prey preferences and dietary overlap amongst Africa's large predators. - SA J. Wildl. Res. 38: 93-108.). - L326: Can you add in the years that these data were collected here again please? - L498: Somewhere around here, I'd be interested in hearing about how the core areas were situated in relation to those of their competitor (i.e., distances from centre of core areas or close to territory boundaries)? - L555: Change to "Moreover, lion and hyena movements and activity differed according to the..." - LL596-608: Can you relate movements to temperatures as well (each hour of the day)? Seems you've tested one potential explanation for activity, but ignored this one that Rob and I used to explain the strict nocturnality of hyaenas. - L603: Is this clearer - "Despite lions and hyaenas exhibiting higher proportions of activity during certain periods of the night..." - L793 and stats throughout: always present the chi-square value, alongside degrees of freedom and the p-value. - L832: "As mainly cursorial predators, spotted hyaenas ..." - L834-836: Isn't this a chicken and egg issue? Are they using those habitats because they like those habitats or their prey likes those habitats? - L838: isn't preferred prey an important factor here alongside habitat? - L844-846: Kasim Rafiq found something similar with leopards and the African carnivore guild as well. I hope that is helpful. Sincerely Matt Hayward ****** 6. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). 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Revision 1
28 Dec 2022 Author Response 1. We have redone the file naming system and corrected this to ensure that our manuscript now meets PLOS ONE’s style requirements for file naming. 2. We provided in our submission the repository information for which our data is held in, within the Zenodo repository and can be found here: Zenodo: https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.5949231 3. We do not find the reference Bewick et al. in our paper. Our reference [5] is for Scognamillo et al., and we have checked through our paper for any reference to Bewick and have found none. 4. We created Fig 1 ourselves using ArcGIS (ESRI ArcMap v.10.0). The previous PDF of Fig 1 uploaded to PLOS ONE was mistakenly created using the screenshot tool instead of exporting as PDF directly from ArcGIS. This resulted in lines around the map, which made it look as if had been pasted from somewhere else. We have since corrected this error by exporting directly from ArcGIS as PDF. 5. Table 1 has now been included into the main manuscript, and the individual files have been removed. 6. We have reviewed our reference list to ensure that it is complete and correct. Reviewer #1: We have created new tables (Tables 3, 4, and 7) and included significant values (into Tables 5, 6, and 8) taken from supplementary materials to replace approximately 4 pages of text in the Results section. Specific suggestions: - L61: We have changed “More specifically, species whose ranges overlap forage different types of food” to “More specifically, species whose ranges overlap forage different types of food, either preferentially or opportunistically” (L64) to reflect this, and included the reference to Hayward and Kerley. - L326: We have added in the years that the data were collected here (L343-351). - L498: We included this information at the end of this section (L522-523) and with a new table in supplementary materials (S6 Table) in where we said: “Furthermore, individual core areas were more distant from competitor core areas than to the nearest territory boundaries of competitors’. This was significant for most cases (all t-tests p < 0.05), except for hyenas to heterospecific competitors in Etosha, and to conspecific competitors in Botswana.” and referred to the new table in the supplementary materials. - L555: We changed “Moreover, lion and hyena movements were found to differ according to the …” to “Moreover, lion and hyena movements and activity differed according to the …” (L585) as recommended. - L596-608: We have added in L556-560 a section indicating the relationship between lion and hyena activity to temperature, in which we also provided the adjusted R2 and included this information in a new figure in S20 Fig in supplementary materials. - L603: We changed “Despite whether lions and hyenas were exhibiting higher proportions of activity during certain periods of the night” to “Despite lions and hyenas exhibiting higher proportions of activity during certain periods of the night” (L652) as recommended. - L793 and stats throughout: We have presented the chi-square values alongside with the degrees of freedom and p-values throughout the manuscript where mentioned (i.e., L666, L668, L669), including the tables and in supplementary materials. - L832: We changed “Mainly cursorial predators, spotted hyenas …” to “As mainly cursorial predators, spotted hyenas” (L865) as recommended. - L834-836: We state here that lions and spotted hyenas within this study were utilizing similar habitats, not whether they or their prey likes those habitats, and referenced this to the study of Durant et al., 2010 which found that lions and spotted hyenas exhibited broad overlap in terms of habitat preferences, regardless of prey (L867-869). - L838: We agree prey is an important factor for the distribution and movements of carnivores, and we include this later in our discussion L888-899 where we state: “Previous studies have demonstrated lion movements to be inextricably tied to the location of water-holes across the landscape due to concentrated search efforts for prey [25,118]. …” and later “Spotted hyenas have been found to use locations far from water for den sites and resting [30,114], thus we suggest that hyenas are potentially choosing to remain in areas with landscape characteristics that minimizes detection [120] while increasing prey vulnerability [121].” In the earlier section of the discussion, we focus here on the differences in the use of similar habitats between the two species, regardless of prey. - L844-846: We have included this recent reference here (L877-879). Attachments Attachment Submitted filename: Response to Reviewers.pdf https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265054.r002
17 Jan 2023 Decision Letter - Marco Apollonio, Editor Coursing hyenas and stalking lions: the potential for inter- and intraspecific interactions PONE-D-22-05250R1 Dear Dr. Baker We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements. Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Marco Apollonio Academic Editor PLOS ONE https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0265054.r003

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