Can native predators be used as a stepping stone to reduce prey naivety to novel predators?

Predator naivety negatively affects reintroduction success and this threat is exacerbated when prey encounters predators with which they have had no evolutionary experience. While methods have been developed to inculcate fear into such predator-naïve individuals, none have been uniformly successful. Exposing ontogenetically- and evolutionary-naïve individuals firstly to native predators may be an effective stepping stone to improved responses to evolutionarily novel predators. We focused on greater bilbies (Macrotis lagotis) and capitalised on a multi-year mammalian recovery experiment whereby western quolls (Dasyurus geoffroii) were reintroduced into parts of a large fenced reserve that contained a population of naïve bilbies. We quantified a suite of antipredator behaviours and measures of general wariness across quoll-exposed and quoll-naive bilby populations. We then translocated both quoll-exposed and quoll-naïve individuals into a large enclosure that contained feral cats (Felis c...