American Pikas' (<i>Ochotona princeps</i>) Foraging Response to Hikers and Sensitivity to Heat in an Alpine Environment

Stafl, Natalie; O’Connor, Mary I.

doi:10.1657/aaar0014-057

Cited by 7 publications

(5 citation statements)

References 37 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…with a broader range of thermal microenvironments have greater opportunities to thermoregulate, and access to these microenvironments depends on motility, body size and features of the environment. The combination of behavioural thermoregulation and controlling activity patterns allows organisms to avoid variation in body temperature, especially at daily and annual frequencies [61,64]. Notably, these feedback mechanisms do not require internal models that relate events separated temporally, just the ability to sense the internal state and respond as feedback homeostats.…”

Section: Internal Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life in fluctuating environments

Bernhardt

O’Connor

Sunday

et al. 2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

121

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Variability in the environment defines the structure and dynamics of all living systems, from organisms to ecosystems. Species have evolved traits and strategies that allow them to detect, exploit and predict the changing environment. These traits allow organisms to maintain steady internal conditions required for physiological functioning through feedback mechanisms that allow internal conditions to remain at or near a set-point despite a fluctuating environment. In addition to feedback, many organisms have evolved feedforward processes, which allow them to adjust in anticipation of an expected future state of the environment. Here we provide a framework describing how feedback and feedforward mechanisms operating within organisms can generate effects across scales of organization, and how they allow living systems to persist in fluctuating environments. Daily, seasonal and multi-year cycles provide cues that organisms use to anticipate changes in physiologically relevant environmental conditions. Using feedforward mechanisms, organisms can exploit correlations in environmental variables to prepare for anticipated future changes. Strategies to obtain, store and act on information about the conditional nature of future events are advantageous and are evidenced in widespread phenotypes such as circadian clocks, social behaviour, diapause and migrations. Humans are altering the ways in which the environment fluctuates, causing correlations between environmental variables to become decoupled, decreasing the reliability of cues. Human-induced environmental change is also altering sensory environments and the ability of organisms to detect cues. Recognizing that living systems combine feedback and feedforward processes is essential to understanding their responses to current and future regimes of environmental fluctuations. This article is part of the theme issue ‘Integrative research perspectives on marine conservation’.

show abstract

Section: Internal Modelmentioning

confidence: 99%

Life in fluctuating environments

Bernhardt

O’Connor

Sunday

et al. 2020

Phil. Trans. R. Soc. B

Self Cite

121

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…For example, animals may alter their activity to avoid predators or competitors [28]. Perhaps most importantly, mammals could potentially become more nocturnal in areas where human activity is high [16] such as logged or hunted areas; indeed, we noticed anecdotally that large animals in parts of Gunung Mulu National Park (subject to both tourism and legal hunting) were more rarely photographed during the day than they were at other sites with less human activity. We tried to account for this by including camera location as a categorical fixed effect in our analysis.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 92%

“…Understanding how species' temporal niches are influenced by sensitivity to climatic factors would greatly improve predictions of climate change impacts across organisms. For example, organisms might be able to cope with being at or near their upper critical thermal limits via behavioural plasticity [4], shifting their activity progressively away from midday and towards twilight and night-time in order to avoid high temperatures [15,16].…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Lowland biotic attrition revisited: body size and variation among climate change ‘winners’ and ‘losers’

et al. 2017

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The responses of lowland tropical communities to climate change will critically influence global biodiversity but remain poorly understood. If species in these systems are unable to tolerate warming, the communities-currently the most diverse on Earth-may become depauperate ('biotic attrition'). In response to temperature changes, animals can adjust their distribution in space or their activity in time, but these two components of the niche are seldom considered together. We assessed the spatio-temporal niches of rainforest mammal species in Borneo across gradients in elevation and temperature. Most species are not predicted to experience changes in spatio-temporal niche availability, even under pessimistic warming scenarios. Responses to temperature are not predictable by phylogeny but do appear to be trait-based, being much more variable in smaller-bodied taxa. General circulation models and weather station data suggest unprecedentedly high midday temperatures later in the century; predicted responses to this warming among small-bodied species range from 9% losses to 6% gains in spatio-temporal niche availability, while larger species have close to 0% predicted change. Body mass may therefore be a key ecological trait influencing the identity of climate change winners and losers. Mammal species composition will probably change in some areas as temperatures rise, but full-scale biotic attrition this century appears unlikely.

show abstract

“…Climate, forage quality, and foraging behavior are tightly linked; for example, pikas are more selective for nitrogen when surrounded by low-quality vegetation and at sites with higher average summer temperatures (Smith and Erb 2013). Pikas balance the energetic costs of haying by increasing selectivity for higher-quality food and reducing exposure to heat stress by spending less time foraging (Stafl and O'Connor 2015). A synergistic relationship has been demonstrated previously between high mean summer temperature and low relative forb cover to predict pika absence .…”

Section: Synergistic-effects Hypothesis Groupmentioning

confidence: 90%

Evaluating mechanisms of plant‐mediated effects on herbivore persistence and occupancy across an ecoregion

2019

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Citation: Wilkening, J. L., E. J. Cole, and E. A. Beever. 2019. Evaluating mechanisms of plant-mediated effects on herbivore persistence and occupancy across an ecoregion. Ecosphere 10(6):Abstract. Contemporary climate change is rapidly creating one of the greatest challenges for management and conservation during the 21st century. Mountain ecosystems, which have a high degree of spatial heterogeneity and contain numerous habitat specialists, have been identified as particularly vulnerable. We used data from multiple years across sites spanning a >40 million ha ecoregion to test hypotheses regarding how community-level characteristics of vegetation may affect a mammalian generalist herbivore, the American pika (Ochotona princeps). We examined patterns of pika persistence across sites in the hydrographic Great Basin, and occupancy within a subset of these sites. We used mixed-effects logistic regression models to compare evidence in support of competing explanations for each pattern within an informationtheoretic framework (using Akaike's information criterion). Models reflected four hypothesized classes of mechanisms related to nutritional ecology, ecosystem function, indirect indication of climatic effects, and (synergistic) combinations of these three classes. At the site level, models reflecting synergistic effects received the most support. At the within-site level, support appeared to be split equally among hypotheses containing predictors related to either nutritional ecology or indirect climate effects. Well-supported predictors included cover of invasive plant species, cover of more-xeric plant species, species evenness, and proportion of graminoid species. Our results both (1) identify important aspects of vegetation communities that may influence herbivore distribution in mountainous areas across a large, diverse geographic region, and (2) contribute to an improved understanding of how mountain ecosystems may be affected by ongoing climate change, more broadly.

show abstract

American Pikas' (Ochotona princeps) Foraging Response to Hikers and Sensitivity to Heat in an Alpine Environment

Cited by 7 publications

References 37 publications

Life in fluctuating environments

Life in fluctuating environments

Lowland biotic attrition revisited: body size and variation among climate change ‘winners’ and ‘losers’

Evaluating mechanisms of plant‐mediated effects on herbivore persistence and occupancy across an ecoregion

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About