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Red and Tibetan Foxes Shared Prey, but Red Foxes Had a Broader Diet

Tibetan fox with pika prey in China
Research · Ecology

A study of sympatric red foxes (Vulpes vulpes) and Tibetan foxes (Vulpes ferrilata) on the northeastern Qinghai–Tibet Plateau found substantial overlap in winter prey but clear differences in how broadly the two species used food resources. Researchers used DNA metabarcoding, in which short DNA markers in dietary samples are sequenced and matched with reference databases to identify multiple food groups, to compare dietary composition and trophic niche breadth — how broadly each species used the available food resources.

Red fox diets were dominated by pikas (Ochotonidae), cricetid rodents such as hamsters and voles (Cricetidae), and bovids (Bovidae). Tibetan foxes mainly consumed pikas, burrowing rodents in the family Spalacidae, and cricetid rodents. The two foxes therefore shared important prey groups, but their overall dietary composition and prey richness were clearly different.

Tibetan foxes had a narrower trophic niche than red foxes. The authors describe the red fox as the more generalist forager and the Tibetan fox as the more specialised species, allowing the two similarly sized carnivores to partition food resources despite living in the same alpine landscape.

The researchers conclude that divergent foraging strategies help explain stable coexistence between the two foxes on the plateau. Rather than avoiding all of the same prey, the species overlap in diet while differing in how widely they exploit available food resources.

Sources and image credit

  1. Wang, S., Xia, R., Liu, S., Li, F., Wang, J., Zhang, G., Liu, R., Zhao, Y., Huang, Y., Ye, Y., & Guo, Y. (2026). Divergent foraging strategies facilitate the coexistence of sympatric red fox (Vulpes vulpes) and Tibetan fox (V. ferrilata) on the northeastern Qinghai-Tibet Plateau. Biological Journal of the Linnean Society, 149(1), blag060.Primary journal article published 5 September 2026. The publisher abstract reports overlapping winter diets but significant differences in dietary composition and richness, with Tibetan foxes occupying a significantly narrower trophic niche than red foxes.

Image: Tibetan fox (Vulpes ferrilata) carrying a plateau pika (Ochotona curzoniae) in Qinghai, China, 19 July 2018. Photo: James Eaton / Wikimedia Commons, originally from iNaturalist. CC0 1.0. Representative image; not a study animal. · CC0 1.0 · Source

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