Spatial overlap in a solitary carnivore: support for the land-tenure, kinship, or resource dispersion hypotheses?

1. There are several alternative hypotheses about the effects of territoriality, kinship, and prey availability on individual carnivore distributions within populations. The first is the land-tenure hypothesis, which predicts that carnivores regulate their density through territoriality and temporal avoidance. The second is the kinship hypothesis, which predicts related individuals will be clumped within populations, and the third is the resource dispersion hypothesis, which suggests that resource richness may explain variable sociality, spatial overlap, or temporary aggregations of conspecifics. 2. Research on the socio-spatial organization of animals is essential in understanding territoriality, intra- and inter-specific competition, and contact rates that influence diverse ecology, including disease transmission between conspecifics and courtship behaviors. 3. We explored these hypotheses with data collected on a solitary carnivore, the cougar (Puma concolor), from 2005 to 2012 in th...