Thursday, August 9, 2018: 10:10 AM
339, New Orleans Ernest N. Morial Convention Center
Carolina Baruzzi, Wildlife, Fisheries, Aquaculture, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS, Brandon T. Barton, Biological Sciences, Mississippi State University, Mississippi State, MS, Heather R Jordan, Biological Sciences, Mississippi State University, Jeffery K. Tomberlin, Entomology, Texas A&M University, College Station, TX, Michael V Cove, Department of Applied Ecology, North Carolina State University, Raleigh and Marcus A Lashley, Wildlife Fisheries and Aquaculture, Mississippi State University, MS
Background/Question/Methods Carrion recycling is a fundamental ecosystem service that is influenced by several factors such as scale of carrion inputs and scavenger community structure. Mass mortality events are massive die-offs of organisms that take place in a relatively short period of time which push the limits of the carrion recycling ecosystem service because of the extreme biomass. Vultures may play a major role recycling carrion nutrients. However, little is known about how the relative importance of vultures in carrion recycling changes with scale, particularly at extreme biomass that could numerically satiate vultures. On an experimental mass mortality event we simulated in July 2016, we showed that vultures increasingly suppressed fly production with scale. Thus, we hypothesized that coupling the vulture functional response with behavioral plasticity could allow vultures to nonlinearly increase consumption with biomass. To test this hypothesis, we used camera traps data from the 2016 experiment for monitoring vulture functional responses and foraging behavior at each site. In the experiment, we simulated 5 different carrion inputs (25, 60, 180, 360, and 725 kg) in five 5m diameter plots. Plots were randomly selected and more than 1 km apart.
Results/Conclusions
Vultures responded linearly to carrion biomass in terms of group size. However, vulture consumption increased in an exponential nonlinear fashion with scale. These data corroborate other evidence from this experiment that vultures increase in relative importance with scale as it relates to resistance and resilience of ecosystems to mass mortality events.
