What If Gone

Species → Cheetah

Cheetah

Acinonyx jubatus

6,670 adult individuals
Extinction risk Vulnerable
PredatorSavannaScientific controversyConservation
Cheetah (Acinonyx jubatus)
Photo: Charles Barilleaux, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0)

The cheetah is a predator specialized in daytime hunting, with residual, fragmented populations declining across sub-Saharan Africa — its IUCN status is Vulnerable. Its disappearance would change little in the short term: lions and hyenas already hunt its prey. What is at stake is a specific niche — daytime hunting, which nocturnal predators do not fill — and how its prey would reorganize around that gap.

What if it disappeared?

Impact Low
1 year

Little change: the cheetah's prey — gazelles, impalas — remain actively hunted by lions and hyenas, which already steal 10 to 12% of its kills today.

Extrapolated
Detail

Extrapolation à partir de Durant (2000), qui documente le vol de proies par les hyènes chez le guépard vivant, pas la conséquence de sa disparition.

Durant (2000) shows that 10 to 12% of kills made by a cheetah in the Serengeti are stolen before it can feed on them, mainly by hyenas — meaning a share of the predation pressure on the same prey already comes from elsewhere. Its disappearance would remove only one predation source among several already active on the same species.

What's missing to confirm it: No study directly measures the effect of removing the cheetah on its prey at one year — the reasoning starts from its role as a hunter already partly redundant with lions and hyenas.

10 years

Cheetahs hunt mostly by day, a time when lions and hyenas, more active at night, hunt little. Ten years after its disappearance, this window would likely stay underused while another predator adapts to fill it.

Extrapolated
Detail

Extrapolation à partir de Durant (2000), qui documente l'évitement comportemental du guépard envers lions et hyènes du vivant de l'espèce, pas le devenir de son créneau de chasse après sa disparition.

The study establishes that the cheetah actively avoids areas and times where lions and hyenas are present, implying a partial specialization in a less contested daytime window. Nothing directly measures how long that window would stay underused once the cheetah is gone.

What's missing to confirm it: No study tracks a real site after the cheetah's disappearance to measure the delay before another predator occupies that daytime window.

100 years

The cheetah went extinct in India in the 1950s. A century later, the gazelles and antelope it once hunted there would plausibly have come under the regulation of other predators already present, such as the wolf or the leopard.

Hypothesis
1000 years

Over a thousand years, other predators already present — lions, hyenas, leopards — would likely have taken over the daytime hunting the cheetah once handled, without its disappearance leaving a lasting gap.

Hypothesis

Documentation

Last verified: August 16, 2026

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