Drought intensifies dominant competitor avoidance and risk‐dependent habitat selection in a large carnivore guild

Intraguild competition is a key force structuring predator communities, with dominant species impacting subordinate species' space use and access to resources. Climate change may intensify or reshape these processes, yet how climate conditions interact with dominance to influence predator space use and resource selection remains poorly understood. In particular, it is well‐established that droughts impact carnivores by altering predator‐prey dynamics, but less is known about how it affects intraguild competition and risk‐dependent habitat selection. Here, we leverage a 12‐year movement dataset for four sympatric species within the African large carnivore guild – lions Panthera leo , leopards Panthera pardus , cheetahs Acinonyx jubatus and African wild dogs Lycaon pictus – to examine how drought affects behavioral tradeoffs between competition avoidance and selection for a key resource, surface water. We found that lions, the most dominant species of the guild, consistently selected for areas closer to water, and selection intensified during times of drought. For subordinate species, selection for water was mediated by both drought conditions and lion risk, but the dynamics of this tradeoff varied based on the relative dominance of each species. During times of drought, leopards and cheetahs avoided water in areas where lion risk was high, but selected water where lion risk was low. In contrast, African wild dogs, the smallest species of the guild, exhibited a similar risk‐sensitive strategy during wetter conditions, but during times of drought avoided areas closer to water across all levels of lion risk, likely due to amplified intraguild competition during drought conditions. These findings suggest that drought can intensify the tradeoffs between resource acquisition and competitor avoidance amongst top predators. In semiarid systems, surface water, around which prey aggregate, is likely a dynamic axis across which intraguild competition unfolds, with implications for intensifying costs for subordinate species under projected increases in drought frequency.