Habitat and patch use by hyraxes: there's no place like home?

Models of central place foraging predict that animals should forage more th oroughly in resource patches located closer to the central place. Travel ti me, cost of transporting food back to the central place, and exposure to pr edators should all act to increase foraging costs with increasing distance from the refuge. We examined habitat and patch use in rock hyraxes (Procavi a capensis) inhabiting a group of kopjes in a semiarid savanna, Augrabies F alls National Park, South Africa. We tested the prediction of more intense patch use closer to the central place by measuring giving-up densities (GUD s) in experimental resource patches set at four different distances from th e kopje and in two microhabitats differing in cover. Surprisingly, hyraxes had their lowest GUDs at intermediate distances from the kopje. These unexp ected results suggest that the sentinel behaviour of hyraxes alters the pro bability of detection of predators for animals foraging away from the kopje .