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1.
The grand skink, Oligosoma grande, is a diurnal rock-dwelling lizard from the tussock grasslands of Central Otago, New Zealand, whose diet includes a variety
of arthropods and fruit. We conducted a field experiment to examine the influence of prey distribution on foraging behavior
and spacing patterns. On sites where prey distribution was unaltered (control sites), males and females differed in diet and
foraging behavior. Most male feeding attempts were directed at large strong-flying insects, and males used a saltatory search
pattern that involved relatively infrequent moves of long duration. Females spent more effort catching small weak-flying insects
and visiting fruiting plants. Their search behavior involved frequent moves of short duration. The placement of meat-bait
on experimental sites led to a redistribution of large flies without influencing other prey types. Experimental females switched
foraging strategy by adopting a search pattern of relatively infrequent moves of long duration, increasing the frequency of
attempts to capture large prey, and reducing the importance of fruit in their diet. The experimental manipulation appeared
to influence space use. On control sites, both sexes had comparably sized home ranges. On experimental sites, male home ranges
were significantly larger than female home ranges.
Received: 3 November 1997 / Accepted after revision: 13 December 1998 相似文献
2.
O.R.J. Anderson R.A. Phillips R.A.R. McGill S. Bearhop 《Environmental pollution (Barking, Essex : 1987)》2010,158(1):98-107
We investigated the concentrations of 22 essential and non-essential elements among a community of Procellariiformes (and their prey) to identify the extent to which trophic position and foraging range governed element accumulation. Stable isotope analysis (SIA) was used to characterise trophic (δ15N) and spatial patterns (δ13C) among species. Few consistent patterns were observed in element distributions among species and diet appeared to be highly influential in some instances. Arsenic levels in seabird red blood cells correlated with δ15N and δ13C, demonstrating the importance of trophic position and foraging range for arsenic distribution. Arsenic concentrations in prey varied significantly across taxa, and in the strength of association with δ15N values (trophic level). In most instances, element patterns in Procellariiformes showed the clearest separation among species, indicating that a combination of prey selection and other complex species-specific characteristics (e.g. moult patterns) were generally more important determining factors than trophic level per se. 相似文献
3.
Annette Sauter Reed Bowman Stephan J. Schoech Gilberto Pasinelli 《Behavioral ecology and sociobiology》2006,60(4):465-474
Optimal foraging theory assumes that a forager can adequately assess the quality of its prey and predicts that parents feed their young low-quality foods only when suffering unpredicted reductions in their ability to provision. Wildland Florida scrub-jays feed their young exclusively arthropods, but suburban parents include human-provided foods in the nestling diet, with possible costs in terms of reduced growth and survival. We tested experimentally whether parents feed human-provided foods, given the apparent costs, because: 1) they do not discriminate between food types, 2) they switch to low-quality, abundant foods when natural food availability in the environment is low, or 3) they switch when the time needed to obtain natural food is high. Parents discriminated between natural and human-provided foods by showing a preference for natural foods when rearing young. When the handling time of natural foods was increased experimentally, parents in the suburban and wildland habitats switched to human-provided foods. Supplementation with natural foods increased preference for this food in both habitats. Suburban parents chose more natural foods than wildland parents, suggesting that they have a greater preference for natural foods. Regardless of preferences demonstrated at feeders, parents in both the suburbs and wildlands delivered mostly natural foods to nestlings, independent of natural food availability. Nonetheless, natural foods are likely to be scarcer in the environment than in our experimental tests. Because natural food availability is lower in the suburbs than in the wildland habitat, parents in the suburbs may be forced to switch to human-provided foods when feeding nestlings. 相似文献
4.
A common explanation for hunting in groups is that doing so yields a greater per capita caloric benefit than hunting solitarily.
This is logical for social carnivores, which rely exclusively on meat for energy, but arguably not for omnivores, which obtain
calories from either plant or animal matter. The common chimpanzee, Pan troglodytes, is one of the few true omnivores that regularly hunts in groups. Studies to date have yielded conflicting data regarding
the payoffs of group hunting in chimpanzees. Here, we interpret chimpanzee hunting patterns using a new approach. In contrast
to the classical assumption that hunting with others maximizes per capita caloric intake, we propose that group hunting is
favored because it maximizes an individual’s likelihood of obtaining important micronutrients that may be found in small quantities
of meat. We describe a mathematical model demonstrating that group hunting may evolve when individuals can obtain micronutrients
more frequently by hunting in groups than by hunting solitarily, provided that group size is below a certain threshold. Twenty
five years of data from Gombe National Park, Tanzania are consistent with this prediction. We propose that our ‘meat-scrap’
hypothesis is a unifying approach that may explain group hunting by chimpanzees and other social omnivores. 相似文献
5.
Among primates, group size is highly variable. The standard ecological model assumes that better predation avoidance as group
size increases favours living in larger groups, whereas increased travel costs and reduced net food intake due to within-group
competition for resources set the upper limit. Folivorous primates, however, tend to defy this generalisation in that some
live in small groups despite low costs of feeding competition. To resolve this ’folivore paradox’, it has been suggested that folivore group size is limited by social factors such as male
harassment or infanticide, or that females can disperse more easily and thus maintain group size near optimum levels. In this
paper, we examine the effects of group size on home range size, day-journey length, activity budget and diet in wild Thomas’s
langurs (Presbytis thomasi), which live in one-male multi-female groups with a limited life cycle. We examined only data from the stable middle tenure
phase when factors such as the strength of the breeding male or the way in which groups were formed did not influence ranging
and activities. During this phase, group size affected day-journey length and home range size, and had a minor effect on diet,
but did not influence time spent feeding or resting, allogrooming or birth rates. Hence the upper limit to group size during
the middle tenure phase in Thomas’s langurs is not set by feeding competition. The folivore paradox is not due to frequent
female dispersal in Thomas’s langurs. The timing of female dispersal is not as expected if it serves to keep group sizes near
the ecological optimum, and groups seem to be below this optimum. Instead, female reproductive success is presumably maximised
in small to mid-sized groups because larger groups show a clear trend to experience higher risk of take-over, often accompanied
by infanticide. Because females can redistribute themselves among nearby groups when groups reorganise each time a new male
starts up a new group, females can keep the group small. Thus, a social factor, risk of infanticide, seems to provide the
selective advantage to small group size in Thomas’s langurs.
Received: 29 July 1999 / Revised: 17 November 1999 / Accepted: 15 October 2000 相似文献
6.
Most studies suggest that during times of nutritional stress, an animal faced with two foraging choices should follow a risk-prone
strategy, choosing the option with highest payoff variance. This “scarcity/risk” hypothesis was developed to account for the
foraging patterns of small animals with high metabolic rates susceptible to the threat of starvation. In this paper, we propose
that animals should also be risk-prone when their diet quality is particularly high, far exceeding that which is needed to
survive. Under these circumstances, the costs of experiencing a low or negative payoff can easily be recouped. We suggest
that large-bodied omnivores are most likely to adopt this “abundance/risk” strategy. We investigate this question among wild
chimpanzees (Pan troglodytes) that choose between a risk-averse strategy of feeding on plant material and a risk-prone strategy of hunting red colobus
monkeys. Using 14 years of data on the Kanyawara chimpanzees of Kibale National Park, Uganda, we find strong evidence that
chimpanzees follow the “abundance/risk” strategy. Both hunting rate (hunts/100 observation hours) and the probability of hunting
upon encountering red colobus monkeys were positively correlated with seasonal consumption of ripe drupe fruits, a class of
preferred food associated with elevated reproductive performance by females. Critically, these results remained statistically
significant after controlling for the potentially confounding effects of male chimpanzee party size and the presence of sexually
receptive females. These findings suggest that the relationship between risk-sensitive foraging and diet quality depends upon
the daily probability of starvation, the number of alternative foraging strategies, and the degree to which diet quality satisfies
an animal’s nutritional requirements. 相似文献
7.
Hormones play a central role in the physiology and behaviour of animals. The recent development of noninvasive techniques
has increased information on physical and social states of individuals through hormone measurements. The relationships among
hormones, life history traits and behaviours are, however, still poorly known. For the first time, we evaluated natural winter
glucocorticoid and testosterone levels in young ungulates in relation to winter progression, diet quality and social rank.
Overwinter, levels of glucocorticoid and testosterone decreased, possibly due to the decline of fawns’ body mass. The relationships
between hormone levels and diet quality were surprising: Fawns fed the control diet presented higher glucocorticoid and lower
testosterone levels then fawns fed the poor diet, suggesting that control fawns faced a higher nutritional stress than those
on the poor diet. Similarly to other studies on social mammals, we found no relationship between faecal glucocorticoid levels
and social rank, suggesting that social stress was similar for dominant and subordinate fawns during winter. Testosterone
levels were not correlated to social rank as found previously in groups of individuals forming stable social hierarchies and
maintaining stable dominance relationships. The simultaneous suppression of glucocorticoid and testosterone levels suggests
for the first time that young ungulates present a hormonal strategy to prevent fast depletion of limited proteins and fat
resources during winter. 相似文献
8.
The selection and establishment of the structure (number and compartments, aggregation criteria, and trophic links) of the food webs is a critical task in trophic modelling. The present work proposes a systematic method to structure trophic networks in pelagic food webs. The biomass-size spectrum (BSS) is a well-established approach to analyze the structure of pelagic communities, and the body size is especially related to the ecological role of the organisms in the pelagic environment. To structure food webs, this work uses detailed arrangements of the community in size classes with increasing widths (like Sheldon-type BSS) as first aggregation criteria, and BSS theory as a framework to integrate the available knowledge about feeding selectivity in order to obtain a method to identify the trophic links between compartments. Diet composition matrices were estimated through the combination of a probability of encounter for each food type and a specific probability of ingestion related to the food size selectivity and other food quality characteristics (e.g., morphology and nutritional quality). The feasibility of this approach has been illustrated through data of size-structured communities extracted from the literature including different planktonic predator guilds (nanoflagellates, cladoceran-dominated zooplankton and copepod-dominated zooplankton) in a high mountain lake (La Caldera, Spain), two subtropical wetland lakes (meso-oligotrophic Laguna Galarza and eutrophic Laguna Iberá, Argentina) and a marine microcosm (Alborán Sea, Mediterranean). The identification of “who eats whom” and “by how much” also allows for more accurate analyses of the trophic control in the BSS. Extensive analyses of the balance between top-down and bottom-up controls were developed for the feeding interactions of the study cases. 相似文献
9.
In many ant species, nuptial flight tends to be short in time and assumed to be synchronous across a large area. Here, we
report that, in the upper Jordan Valley, northern Israel, massive nuptial flights of Carpenter ants (Camponotus sp.) occur frequently throughout the summer, and their alates form up to 90% of the diet of the greater mouse-tailed bat
(Rhinopoma microphyllum) during this period. This fat and protein-rich diet enables female bats to lactate during summer, and the large amount of
fat that both sexes accumulate may serve as an energy source for their following winter hibernation and posthibernation mating
in early spring (March–April). We suggest that the annual movement of these bats to the Mediterranean region of Israel may
have evolved in order to enable them to exploit the extremely nutritious forms of ant alates when the bats’ energetic demands
are highest. 相似文献
10.
Brown CJ Knight BW McMaster ME Munkittrick KR Oakes KD Tetreault GR Servos MR 《Environmental pollution (Barking, Essex : 1987)》2011,159(7):1923-1931
Fish community changes associated with a tertiary treated municipal wastewater effluent outfall in the Speed River, Ontario, Canada, were evaluated at nine sites over two seasons (2008) using standardized electrofishing. Habitat evaluations were conducted to ensure that the riffle sites selected were physically similar. The fish community was dominated by several species of darters that differed in their response to the effluent outfall. There was a significant decrease in Greenside Darter (Etheostoma blennioides) but an increase in Rainbow Darter (E. caeruleum) abundance directly downstream of the outfall. Stable isotope signatures (δ13C and δ15N), which indicate shifts in energy utilization and flow, increased in Rainbow Darter downstream, but showed no change in Greenside Darter. Rainbow Darter may be exploiting a food source that is not as available at upstream sites giving them a competitive advantage over the Greenside Darter immediately downstream of the outfall. 相似文献