# Movement Patterns of the Mongoose in Hawaii > How far does a mongoose wander? Over three years in Hawaii’s sugar cane country, 546 marked small Indian mongooses showed they are true homebodies: females usually stayed within about a tenth of a mile between captures and males within about a quarter. A female moved nearly five miles away was caught a month later heading home. Summary by Kersey Lawrence, Original Wisdom. Updated 9 November 2026. Page: https://www.originalwisdom.com/tracking-literature/1969-tomich-movement-patterns-mongoose-hawaii/ ## Citation and access - **Authors:** P. Quentin Tomich - **Year published:** 1969 - **Journal or source:** The Journal of Wildlife Management - **Full citation:** Tomich, P. Q. 1969. Movement patterns of the mongoose in Hawaii. The Journal of Wildlife Management 33(3): 576–584. - **DOI:** 10.2307/3799380 - **Access status:** Publisher link only - **Where to find it:** https://doi.org/10.2307/3799380 ## Tags - **Species:** Mammals > Small Indian mongoose - **Region:** North America > United States - **Behaviour and ecology:** Behaviour; Dispersal; Home range; Movement; Site fidelity - **Methods and technology:** Capture-mark-recapture; Descriptive statistics - **Data type:** New field data - **Observer qualification:** Not needed - **Discipline:** Behaviour and ecology - **Year published:** 1969 ## Detailed keywords - **Species:** Studied: small Indian mongoose (Herpestes auropunctatus). Mentioned: cat flea (Ctenocephalides felis), collected from the same animals in a separate study; dogs, which killed three mongooses in traps; rodents, as part of the plague problem the study served. - **Location and habitat:** Hamakua District, northeastern Hawaii Island, Hawaii, United States: a 30-square-mile coastal belt running 12 miles from Kukuihaele (near Waipio Valley) southeast to the Kaapahu Homesteads, on the lower slope of Mauna Kea. Sugar cane fields from the sea cliffs to about 2,000 ft, with pasture, remnant native forest and exotic plantings above; deep gulches, rocky wasteland, roadside brush and rank grasses. Trap sites at 120 to 2,360 ft. Traplines named Kaapahu, Kalopa, Ahualoa, Paauhau, Kapulena and Haina, among others. Compared with an earlier study in Puerto Rico. - **Topics:** home range; daily movement; sex differences in movement; return to the trap of previous capture; attachment to a home area; dispersal and vagrants; homing after displacement; trap shyness (wariness learned from capture); seasonal patterns in trap success; breeding season; overlapping ranges and social structure; territoriality (uncertain); omnivorous diet and abundant cover; plague in fleas, rodents and people; removal trapping (trap-out); limits of mark-and-release methods. - **Statistics or models:** Average distance between captures (av. D, after Brant 1962); adjusted range length (ARL, after Stickel 1954, adding half the trap spacing, 250 ft, to each end); Wilcoxon’s rank test for all non-parametric data; means with standard errors, percentages and ratios. Two internal inconsistencies: (1) in Table 1, the non-breeding season row gives 33 males (57.5%) and 25 females (43.1%) out of 58, but 33 of 58 is 56.9% and the two percentages add to 100.6%; (2) the Discussion gives range lengths for animals caught three or more times as n = 21 males and n = 14 females, but Table 4 lists 51 males and 28 females caught three or more times. - **Data type:** New field data: monthly mark-and-release trapping, April 1961 to April 1964 (37 months), followed by removal trapping in April to June 1964. ## Synopsis ### 1. What they did The small Indian mongoose was brought to Hawaii in 1883 and became common there. Mongooses matter for public health, farming and game management, and in the Hamakua District of Hawaii Island they were part of a problem of plague in fleas, rodents and people. Little was known about how far small carnivores move, so the author set out to describe how mongooses use space. - Trapping. Seven traplines were set along roads, with traps 0.1 mile apart, usually 21 traps in two 1-mile rows crossing each other. Each line was trapped for 4 days every month for 12 to 37 months, from April 1961 to April 1964: 147 traps in all, baited mostly with fresh beef trimmings. - Marking. Each mongoose was lightly anaesthetised with ether, marked with ear tags and clipped toes, and released where it was caught. - Measuring movement. Trap sites were plotted on topographic maps. For each animal the author measured the average distance between successive captures (av. D) and the range length between the two farthest capture points, adjusted for trap spacing (adjusted range length, ARL). - Removal trapping. After marking ended, four lines were trapped out for 22 to 34 days, which recovered 99 marked animals. ### 2. What they found Trapping - 546 mongooses were marked and caught 861 times in 17,766 trap-days: one mongoose for every 20.7 trap-days. - Mongooses grew wary of traps after being caught. Capture rates fell from one per 7 trap-days in a line’s first month to one per 20 by the eighth month. Mongooses often scratched and dug around traps to reach the bait without going in. - Every year captures slumped in late summer (August to October), even though many young animals were then fending for themselves. This was seen both in the heavily populated Kaapahu line and in the six lightly populated lines. - About six males were caught for every four females. In the breeding season (January to July), males made up 77.4% of captures of animals caught more than once. - 41.0% of males and 37.8% of females were caught again at least once; the average gap between captures was 4.5 months for both sexes. How far they moved - Average distance between captures was 1,290 ft for males and 484 ft for females (about 0.25 and 0.10 mile), a significant difference (P < 0.01). Males moved about 2.7 times as far as females. - Distances were similar across traplines. - The longer the gap between captures, the farther apart the capture sites, and this increase was greater for males. - 18.7% of male recaptures and 41.0% of female recaptures were in the same trap as before. Fewer males returned to the same trap as time went on, while females kept returning at about the same rate. - Adjusted range length averaged 2,184 ft for males (about 0.4 mile) and 1,062 ft for females (about 0.2 mile). Male ranges grew with the number of captures; female ranges grew much less. - Males’ ranges seldom exceeded 1.0 mile and females’ seldom exceeded 0.4 mile. Long moves Only two mongooses moved between distant traplines: a male that moved 2.9 miles in 31 months and a male that moved 5.0 miles in 12.5 months, ending 800 ft higher. A female caught on the Waimea Plain and released at Paauhau was caught again a month later, 4.8 miles away in the direction of where they had first been caught. ### 3. What they concluded - The small Indian mongoose is a sedentary animal that rarely disperses, with movements notably restricted even for a small carnivore. - Males are 1.4 times heavier than females, which may explain why they need more space. - The small home range seems to go with plentiful cover and a varied, omnivorous diet. Social needs probably shape home ranges too. - Individual ranges appear to overlap a great deal, which suggests a complex social structure and may rule out strong territoriality, though whether the species is territorial is uncertain. - The single displaced female suggests a strong homing instinct. - If daily range is about the same as av. D, the maximum range is about four times the daily range. - The trap spacing may have been too wide to measure female ranges well. Even so, trapping only 4 days a month over 3 years avoided animals getting used to traps, and long-term data like these could not have been gathered in any other practical way. ### 6. Other technologies, skills or innovations - Ear tags combined with toe clipping for marking individuals. - Four trap types: commercial live traps, a home-made hardware-cloth trap, and unbaited steel traps set beside cage traps (steel traps only during removal trapping). The home-made trap’s door caught some animals across the neck or back, killing five. - Distances measured by car odometer and topographic maps. ### 7. Implications for conservation (from the paper) - The study was designed to help understand the mongoose’s place in the spread of plague among fleas, rodents and people in the Hamakua District. ## Cite this summary Lawrence, K. 2026. Summary of: Movement Patterns of the Mongoose in Hawaii (Tomich, 1969). Original Wisdom, Tracking Literature. https://www.originalwisdom.com/tracking-literature/1969-tomich-movement-patterns-mongoose-hawaii/