The corrupted carnivore: how humans are rearranging the return of the carnivore‐scavenger relationship

Pauli, Jonathan N.; Donadío, Emiliano; Lambertucci, Sergio A.

doi:10.1002/ecy.2385

Cited by 21 publications

(13 citation statements)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Meanwhile, reductions in condor use of protected areas could have important consequences for human‐wildlife coexistence. In nearby agricultural landscapes, condors are susceptible to intentional and unintentional poisoning of carrion (Pauli et al, 2018; Plaza et al, 2019); condors have also increasingly been observed feeding at landfills in the region (Duclos et al, 2020). Pumas could also be at greater risk of conflict with humans and livestock if they, too, move outside the park in response to the reduction of their prey base (Cocimano et al, 2021; Wilkinson et al, 2020); conversely, pumas may instead remain and shift to consuming smaller rodent or lagomorph prey (Osorio et al, 2020).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cascading effects of a disease outbreak in a remote protected area

Monk

Smith

Donadío³

et al. 2022

Ecology Letters

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Disease outbreaks induced by humans increasingly threaten wildlife communities worldwide. Like predators, pathogens can be key top-down forces in ecosystems, initiating trophic cascades that may alter food webs. An outbreak of mange in a remote Andean protected area caused a dramatic population decline in a mammalian herbivore (the vicuña), creating conditions to test the cascading effects of disease on the ecological community. By comparing a suite of ecological measurements to pre-disease baseline records, we demonstrate that mange restructured tightly linked trophic interactions previously driven by a mammalian predator (the puma). Following the mange outbreak, scavenger (Andean condor) occurrence in the ecosystem declined sharply and plant biomass and cover increased dramatically in predation refuges where herbivory was historically concentrated. The evidence shows that a disease-induced trophic cascade, mediated by vicuña density, could supplant the predator-induced trophic cascade, mediated by vicuña behaviour, thereby transforming the Andean ecosystem.

show abstract

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Cascading effects of a disease outbreak in a remote protected area

Monk

Smith

Donadío³

et al. 2022

Ecology Letters

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Ecologists have historically viewed carnivores, including martens, as habitat and resource specialists (Rosenzweig, ), but the global recovery of carnivores across diverse landscapes has questioned this paradigm (Pauli, Donadio, & Lambertucci, ). We observed highly variable diets across marten populations, and our findings are consistent with recent studies illustrating widespread dietary plasticity among carnivores across ecosystems (Davis et al., ; Newsome et al., ; Smith, Wang, & Wilmers, ).…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Ecologists have historically viewed carnivores, including martens, as habitat and resource specialists (Rosenzweig, 1966), but the global recovery of carnivores across diverse landscapes has questioned this paradigm (Pauli, Donadio, & Lambertucci, 2018 2016). Nevertheless, ecologists often assume that the functional roles of carnivores are conserved across ecosystems and clades.…”

Section: Martes Americana M Artes Caurinamentioning

confidence: 99%

Stable isotopes reveal limited Eltonian niche conservatism across carnivore populations

et al. 2019

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Niche conservatism—the retention of ecological traits across space and time—is an emerging topic of interest because it can predict responses to global change. The conservation of Grinnellian niche characteristics, like species‐habitat associations, has received widespread attention, but the conservation of Eltonian traits such as consumer–resource interactions remains poorly understood. The inability to quantify Eltonian niches through space and time has historically limited the assessment of Eltonian niche conservatism and the dynamics of foraging across populations. Consequently, the relative influence of endogenous factors like phylogeny versus exogenous features like environmental context has rarely been addressed. We tested Eltonian niche conservatism using a paired design to compare foraging among four populations of American martens Martes americana and Pacific martens Martes caurina, morphologically and ecologically similar sister taxa that are allopatrically distributed throughout western North America. We developed a three‐stage isotopic framework and then quantified dietary niche overlap between the sister species and paired island‐mainland sites to assess the relative influence of endogenous (i.e., species) versus exogenous (i.e., environment) factors on Eltonian niches. First, we calculated pairwise dietary overlap in scaled δ‐space using standard ellipses. We then estimated proportional diets (“p‐space”) for individuals using isotopic mixing models and developed a novel utilization distribution overlap approach to quantify proportional dietary overlap. Lastly, we estimated population‐level proportional diets and quantified the differential use of functional prey groups across sites. We detected no pairwise overlap of dietary niches in δ‐space, and distributions of individual diets in p‐space revealed little overlap in core diets across populations. All pairwise comparisons of individuals revealed significant differences in diet, and population‐level comparisons detected contrasting use of functional prey groups. We developed a multi‐faceted isotopic framework to quantify Eltonian niches and found limited evidence of Eltonian niche conservatism across carnivore populations. Our findings are consistent with the growing recognition of dietary plasticity in consumers and suggest that consumer–resource dynamics are largely driven by exogenous environmental factors like land cover and community composition. These results illustrate the context‐dependent nature of foraging and indicate consumer functionality can be dynamic. A http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/1365-2435.13266/suppinfo is available for this article.

show abstract

“…Our finding of a unique mitochondrial lineage in that region suggests that those condors may have represented an endemic coastal subpopulation as first suggested by Lydekker (1895), and not an extension of the distributional range from the mountains due to the abundance of food offered by sheep farms as hypothesized by Adams (1907). Nevertheless, it is possible that the coastal subpopulation was already in decline due to the loss of marine subsidies, forcing condors to feed more on terrestrial mammals (Lambertucci et al., 2018), resulting in a deadly conflict with Patagonian ranchers (Ballejo et al., 2020; Pauli et al., 2018). Paintings and narratives from this period illustrate the persecution of condors, suggesting that hunting was common (e.g., Castellanos, 1923; Darwin, 1841; Lydekker, 1895) and a likely cause behind the contraction of the species distributional range to remote areas in the mountains.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Andean and California condors possess dissimilar genetic composition but exhibit similar demographic histories

Padró

Lambertucci

Perrig

et al. 2020

Ecology and Evolution

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Genetic diversity is widely recognized as centrally important for biodiversity assessment and conservation planning (Willoughby et al., 2015). Such focus is especially important when considering threatened and endangered species as they typically display low levels of genetic diversity, which can lead to reduced adaptive potential to environmental change (Bijlsma & Loeschcke, 2012). A common strategy to restore genetic diversity is the translocation of individuals to augment small and declining populations (Moritz, 1999; Whiteley et al., 2015). However, the motivation for restoring genetic diversity is often based on genetic surveys of modern populations, which assumes that past genetic diversity was always higher (Matocq & Villablanca, 2001; Napier et al., 2020). Nevertheless, long-term effects of translocations have been rarely assessed, and findings are inconsistent across systems: Some translocations have succeeded in increasing population fitness by incorporating new alleles (Johnson et al., 2010; Whiteley et al., 2015), while others have failed by

show abstract

The corrupted carnivore: how humans are rearranging the return of the carnivore‐scavenger relationship

Cited by 21 publications

References 14 publications

Cascading effects of a disease outbreak in a remote protected area

Cascading effects of a disease outbreak in a remote protected area

Stable isotopes reveal limited Eltonian niche conservatism across carnivore populations

Andean and California condors possess dissimilar genetic composition but exhibit similar demographic histories

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About