At least nine felid species can co-occur in Southeast Asia, thus
providing an unusual opportunity to investigate poorly known guild
structure and the factors controlling it. Using camera-trap data, we
quantified space use, temporal activity, and multi-dimensional niche
overlap of tiger, clouded leopard, marbled cat, leopard cat, and Asiatic
golden cat in Htamanthi Wildlife Sanctuary of Myanmar. We hypothesized
that the spatio-temporal behaviour of smaller cats can reflect avoidance
of the larger cats, which are both potential competitors and predators,
and similar-sized guild members would partition their niches in space or
time to reduce competition for resources. Our approach involved
single-species occupancy modelling to identify site covariates, pairwise
spatial overlap using Bayesian inference, and activity overlap with
Kernel density estimation and multivariate analyses to test hypotheses.
We found tiger and marbled cats were primarily diurnal, clouded leopard
and leopard cat were nocturnal and golden cat exhibited cathemeral
activity. We observed a complex pattern of guild assembly and potential
competition involving strong niche displacement between the golden cat
and marbled cat, but high overlap between the relatively similarly-sized
pairing of clouded leopard and golden cat, and the markedly
differently-sized tiger -- golden cat pairing. No significant evidence
of mesopredator release was observed and the felid assembly in Northern
Myanmar appeared to be partitioned mainly on a spatial, rather than
temporal, dimension. Nonetheless, the temporal association between the
three mesopredators was inversely related to the similarity in their
body sizes. The insights into this felid guild revealed that the largest
niche differences in the use of space and time occurred between the
three smaller species, most evidently between the Asiatic golden
cat-marbled cat pairing, followed by marbled cat - leopard cat pairing.
This study offers new insight into carnivore guild assembly and, adds
substantially to knowledge of five of the least known felids of
conservation concern.