Scavenging is a common feeding behavior by many species that plays an important role in ecosystem stability and function while also providing ecosystem services. Despite its importance, facultative scavenging on large animal carcasses has generally been overlooked in Asian temperate forest ecosystems. The aim of this study was to determine the composition and feeding behavior of the facultative scavenger guild as it relates to sika deer (Cervus nippon) carcasses in Japanese forests. There are no obligate scavengers or large predators that kill adult ungulates, but humans fill the role of large predators by culling deer for population management. We documented nine vertebrate species scavenging on deer carcasses and found that mammals were more frequent scavengers than birds and also fed for longer durations. This result suggests that there is a facultative scavenger guild composed mainly of mammals in our forest ecosystem and that carcass utilization by birds was restricted to only forest species. Raccoon dogs (Nyctereutes procyonoides) and Asian black bears (Ursus thibetanus) were the most frequent scavenger species and also fed for longer durations than other scavengers. There were significant seasonal differences in scavenging by Asian black bear, Japanese marten (Martes melampus), and mountain hawk‐eagle (Nisaetus nipalensis), suggesting the availability of other food resources may alter facultative scavenging by each species. Our results support that scavenging is widespread in this system and likely has important functions including building links in the food web.

We present a measurement of the b-quark inclusive fragmentation function in Z 0 decays using a novel kinematic B-hadron energy reconstruction technique. The measurement was performed using 350,000 hadronic Z 0 events recorded in the SLD experiment at SLAC between 1997 and 1998. The small and stable SLC beam spot and the CCD-based vertex detector were used to reconstruct B-decay vertices with high efficiency and purity, and to provide precise measurements of the kinematic quantities used in this technique. We measured the B energy with good efficiency and resolution over the full kinematic range. We compared the scaled B-hadron energy distribution with models of b-quark fragmentation and with several ad hoc functional forms. A number of models and functions are excluded by the data. The average scaled energy of weakly-decaying B hadrons was measured to be < x b > = 0.709 ± 0.003 (stat) ± 0.003 (syst) ± 0.002 (model).