Research overview: puma temporal avoidance of humans and shifts toward nocturnality

Where pumas share landscapes with people, they often avoid humans in time as well as space, becoming more nocturnal to sidestep daytime human activity, and this overview synthesizes the telemetry evidence. GPS and activity data show that cats in human-dominated areas concentrate movement and hunting in the night and dim hours, reducing overlap with people, hikers, and traffic. The overview discusses how this temporal partitioning lets pumas persist near development but may carry costs, including reduced foraging efficiency, altered energetics, and compression of activity into fewer hours. It also connects to broader findings that mammals worldwide increase nocturnality in response to human disturbance. Understanding temporal avoidance complements spatial movement studies, revealing that cats adapt to human pressure along the axis of time, not only by where but by when they move.