Rethinking solitude: 5 decades of data reveal social tolerance in a traditionally solitary felid

Abstract Historically, felids are thought to follow a social structure where individuals are solitary and limit interactions with other individuals of the same sex. Behaviorally it is understood that individual male cats defend territories from others, which limits social interactions between individuals outside of reproduction. However, there are frequent reports that felid populations exhibit more social tolerance than previously described. In South Texas, Bobcat (Lynx rufus) densities are suspected to be high and observational evidence of trapping rates and camera trap data indicate that there may be a high degree of overlap among home ranges of bobcats in South Texas. Using data from VHF and GPS collared bobcats collected between 1985 to 2024, we investigated Bobcat home range overlap and proximity across South Texas. We calculated 95% autocorrelated kernel density estimates and quantified the degree of home range overlap between conspecific individuals. For those individual pairs that had > 13.2% overlap (the mean overlap of all pairs), we estimated whether individuals moved independently, avoided each other, or moved closer to one another. From 1981 to 2024, the average Bobcat home range was 7.91 km2 (95% confidence interval = 6.43 to 9.62 km2) and did not significantly change for males or females across decades. We observed 102 instances of home range overlap, 59 in VHF-monitored individuals and 43 of them in GPS-monitored bobcats. From our proximity analysis of GPS-monitored bobcats, individuals primarily moved independently of one another but did not avoid each other as much as might be expected, especially in same-sex comparisons. Using a long-term dataset on bobcats, we reveal that bobcats are not inherently solitary within our study system. Our work provides a framework for examining social interactions in other traditionally solitary animals.