This is scientific Americans 60 Second Science.

I'm Jason Goldman.

The cheetah is the rarest big cat in Africa.

Less than 7,000 adults remain on the planet. Think of it this way. For every

cheetah on the planet, there's more than four Starbucks coffee shops. The most important Cheetah stronghold is in Central

Namibia, but the Cheetas there don't live within national parks. They live on

privately owned farmland. There were farmers having huge problems with Cheetahs, losing a lot of livestock, and there were other farmers who actually didn't have any problem at all.

Ecologist Yorg Melzheimer from the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research in Berlin

assumed at first that all farmers had cheetah trouble.

It was just that some were more likely to complain about it.

But after tracking 50 collared cheetas, he began to suspect that there really was a pattern to their

killing.

By the time his team had data from 106 Cheetas, collared over the course of a decade, not only was he certain that Cheetas were more likely to kill in some places than in others, but that he could solve the problem.

We indeed found these communication hubs of cheetahs,

which are spread evenly across the landscape,

with a high activity of cheetahs within the hubs.

Cheetahs are an a social species, but they still need to trade information.

They don't meet physically, typically not, but they leave marks at prominent landmarks where they either

use urine or feces to communicate with each other.

Think of it as a coffee shop for cats where animals trade gossip.

Even though these communication hubs only comprise around 10% of the landscape,

Cheetists spend most, sometimes all of their time within them.

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