Species → African Wild Dog
African Wild Dog
Lycaon pictus
What if it disappeared?
Impact ModerateAfter collapsing from 60 to 30 individuals in a single year, the Serengeti plains wild dog population stagnated at around 22 individuals for sixteen years before going locally extinct — growing competition from lions and hyenas, combined with a disease outbreak, delivered the final blow.
DocumentedDetail
Burrows, R., Hofer, H. et East, M.L. (1994). Demography, extinction and intervention in a small population: the case of the Serengeti wild dogs. Proceedings of the Royal Society of London B, 256(1345), 281–292.
Unlike the cheetah, whose population in the same Serengeti remained stable despite a comparable rise in lions (see the cheetah entry), the wild dog responded to the same pressure with a range contraction followed by local disappearance — two subordinate species, two opposite outcomes in the face of the same dominant predator.
In areas with a heavy lion presence or depleted prey, wild dogs spend two to three times more energy hunting, cover more distance each day, and fall back on small antelope 30% more often instead of their preferred larger prey.
DocumentedDetail
Creel, S., Redcliffe, J., Goodheart, B. et al. (2025). Prey depletion, interspecific competition, and the energetics of hunting in endangered African wild dogs, Lycaon pictus. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 122(6), e2414772122.
A field study using accelerometer collars, directly measuring wild dogs' energy expenditure rather than inferring it from behavior. Notably, the number of prey killed per day does not change detectably — wild dogs adjust their hunting effort to meet their immediate needs rather than suffering a drop in hunting success, which shifts the cost of competition toward energy expenditure rather than direct starvation.
The success of lion conservation programs in shared protected areas could impose an underestimated cost on the recovery of the wild dog specifically — a tension that does not arise the same way for the cheetah, whose population withstands the same pressure better.
ExtrapolatedDetail
Extrapolation à partir de Swanson, Caro, Davies-Mostert et al. (2014), Journal of Animal Ecology, qui documente le contraste guépard/lycaon face au lion sans quantifier directement ce compromis de gestion.
The three entries for lion, cheetah and wild dog in this database together document the same interspecific dominance relationship with very different outcomes depending on the subordinate species — a reminder that 'protecting the apex predator' does not automatically benefit every predator subordinate to it in the same ecosystem.
What's missing to confirm it: A direct quantification of the management trade-off between lion density and wild dog recovery within the same protected area remains to be established.
Documentation
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IUCN Red List — Lycaon pictus, évaluation 2020 (Woodroffe & Sillero-Zubiri)
Accessed August 7, 2026
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Burrows, Hofer & East (1994) — Demography, extinction and intervention in a small population: the Serengeti wild dogs, Proceedings of the Royal Society B
Accessed August 7, 2026
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Creel, Redcliffe, Goodheart et al. (2025) — Prey depletion, interspecific competition, and the energetics of hunting in endangered African wild dogs, PNAS
Accessed August 7, 2026
Last verified: August 14, 2026