A common rule for the scaling of carnivore density

This study uncovered a general relationship between the population density of carnivores and the availability of their prey, showing that across species roughly the same amount of prey biomass supports a given amount of predator biomass. By compiling data across many carnivores, including big cats, the authors demonstrated that predator density scales predictably with prey biomass and inversely with body size, so larger carnivores occur at lower densities for a given prey base. The finding provided a quantitative, cross-species rule linking prey supply to predator numbers and helped explain why big cats are naturally rare and why prey depletion so directly threatens them. It became a foundational result in macroecology and carnivore conservation, underpinning estimates of how many predators a landscape can sustain and why bottom-up control by prey is so pervasive among the large felids.