Every other Friday on Morning Edition, the Outside/In team answers a question from a listener about the natural world.
This week, Alex asked via Instagram, “What are some of the different ways that different species mark their territory?”
Home, home on the range
So, the first thing I learned digging into this question is that it’s important to distinguish between a home range and a territory.
Lots of animals have a home range, where they spend most of their lives, but territory – the part they’ll actually defend if things get tense – is typically much smaller.
So maybe the section of New Hampshire where you live is your home range, but your house is your actual territory. If somebody walked in uninvited, chances are you’d be a little perturbed.
That being said, different animals are marking and defending different things. Gulls might defend their nest from other gulls for example, but a pack of wolves might be defending resources: good hunting areas, watering holes, or a really solid pizza joint (the best ones are hard to come by you know).
But regardless of how big a territory is, or why an animal is choosing to protect it, marking territory isn’t just about defense. It might also be an invitation.
This social media platform stinks
Ever watch a dog sniff the same spot of grass for a long time? Carnivore ecologist Dr. Christine Wilkinson says she thinks about it like her dog is just reading the newspaper.
“Because animals can't just call each other up on the phone or open up their Instagram to see what their friends and enemies have been up to and where they're at,” she said. “They need other communication tools that are reliable over distances when they can't be physically in a location at a given time.”
In other words, there’s a lot of subtext to animal communication, just like there is with humans. It’s not always a warning; sometimes marking territory is an invitation for potential mates or a message to conspecifics (friendly members of the same species).
It’s not necessarily meant to be aggressive – in fact, marking territory is a way of avoiding aggression.
Wilkinson works at the University of California, Berkeley, where one of her main areas of focus is hyenas. Like a lot of animals, they communicate boundaries with scent: Hyenas have anal glands that produce a paste they brush onto grass stalks.
Another common way animals communicate territory is through sound - a wolf pack howling, for example, or bird calls.
“A lot of birds have and defend territories and they're singing for a number of different reasons,” Wilkinson said.
Sometimes, animals use visual displays as well. Dogs often scuff the ground after pooping, spreading scent, and leaving a visual mark. Cats that round their backs when approached are making it clear they don’t want you to come closer.
Marking territory can even be a sort of collaborative multimedia art project:
“White rhino will make these dung piles that show where their territories are, and then other rhinos will kind of come and keep pooping on top of that same dung pile until it can be really, really huge,” Wilkinson says. “And it becomes a visual marker as well as a scent marker.”
Hacking territoriality
Not every animal displays territorial behavior – but it is common enough that humans have hacked some of these communication methods in order to try and manage human-wildlife interaction.
Wilkinson says researchers are looking at whether urine from big cats can be used to keep other big cats away from livestock. And coyote urine has long been used by hunters and gardeners to keep unwanted animals away.
“Even you can, right now, go purchase coyote urine on the internet for like 12 bucks,” Wilkinson told me.
But again, the important thing is to remember that there are layers to all of the ways that animals communicate.
“I think a lot of people think ‘territory’ and they think ‘keep out,’ ” Wilkinson said. “But as we've noticed from all these examples so far, sometimes it means just, like, showing who you are and where you stand and what you are looking for.”
That’s an important note for folks employing coyote urine in their gardens – which in addition to scaring away prey animals has occasionally been known to attract other coyotes in search of mates.
Talk about mixed messages.
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