Grasshopper consumption by grey wolves and implications for ecosystems

Barton, Brandon T.; Hill, JoVonn G.; Wolff, Carter L.; Newsome, Thomas M.; Ripple, William J.; Lashley, Marcus A.

doi:10.1002/ecy.2892

Cited by 6 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 15 publications

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“…As advocated by other authors (Meadows et al 2017; Barton et al 2020) and partially supported by our results, the use of arthropod generalists seems promising as a proxy to study management, chronic anthropogenic disturbances, and conservation. Besides the study of grazing disturbance, arthropods in general may be amazing candidates to study fine scale climate change (Staude et al 2018; Høye 2020).…”

Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Strands of Connection: Livestock Grazing, Vegetation Density, and Orb-Weaver Spider Persistence

Oyarzabal,

Guimarães

2023

Preprint

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Studies on the effects of grazing disturbances in grasslands have shown mixed results for spider diversity, mainly regarding their guilds. While ungrazing, low, and moderate grazing potentially enhance diversity of orb-weavers, heavy grazing seems to reduce specieś richness. On the population level, studies of orb-weavers are scarce, and the effects of grazing are unknow. In this way, we investigated the effects of different levels of grazing on population persistence of orb-weaver spiders, hypothesizing that low to intermediate disturbances benefit populations. We predict that high grazing, due to the removal of vegetation structure, will negatively affect occupancy and abundance of orb-weavers. For that, we experimentally controlled grazing pressure and obtained population occurrence and counts of two orb-weaver spider species,Argiope argentataandAlpaida quadrilorata. We found thatA. argentatawas directly affected by grazing, as it relies on higher vegetation for web-building. In contrast,A. quadrilorata, which occurs in cattle-resistant rosette plants, showed no effects of grazing.Implications for insect conservation:Our study emphasizes the need for balanced grazing practices and habitat conservation to protect orb-weaver spiders and other arthropods, as well as, species-specific effects for species from the same guild, underscoring their ecological significance in maintaining ecosystem stability.

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Section: Discussionsupporting

confidence: 86%

Strands of Connection: Livestock Grazing, Vegetation Density, and Orb-Weaver Spider Persistence

Oyarzabal,

Guimarães

2023

Preprint

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“…Gut contents and fecal macroremains often can be identified only to family or order (if that). Many interactions are infrequent and atypical and are thus unlikely to be detected or deduced: Leopards eat fish (Balme et al 2019), sharks eat birds (Drymon et al 2019), wolves eat grasshoppers (Barton et al 2020), hippos eat elephants and other hippos (Dudley et al 2016). Such rare interactions may strongly influence consumer fitness and community dynamics (e.g., Dudley et al 2016), as well as assumptions about forbidden links in food webs ( Jordano 2016).…”

Section: The Problem Of Cryptic Interactionsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Resolving Food-Web Structure

Pringle

Hutchinson

2020

Annu. Rev. Ecol. Evol. Syst.

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Food webs are a major focus and organizing theme of ecology, but the data used to assemble them are deficient. Early debates over food-web data focused on taxonomic resolution and completeness, lack of which had produced spurious inferences. Recent data are widely believed to be much better and are used extensively in theoretical and meta-analytic research on network ecology. Confidence in these data rests on the assumptions ( a) that empiricists correctly identified consumers and their foods and ( b) that sampling methods were adequate to detect a near-comprehensive fraction of the trophic interactions between species. Abundant evidence indicates that these assumptions are often invalid, suggesting that most topological food-web data may remain unreliable for inferences about network structure and underlying ecological and evolutionary processes. Morphologically cryptic species are ubiquitous across taxa and regions, and many trophic interactions routinely evade detection by conventional methods. Molecular methods have diagnosed the severity of these problems and are a necessary part of the cure. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics, Volume 51 is November 2, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

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“…But the survey also found >50 other species of vertebrate prey—birds, bears, rodents, fish, mustelids, and even toads—many of which were previously unrecorded. Nor do wolves stop at vertebrates; one loner in Idaho ate enough grasshoppers to meet 10% of its daily nutritional demand ( 15 ). Among the sites studied by Roffler et al.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Wolves, otters, ungulates, and a promising path for ecology

Pringle

2023

Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A.

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Grasshopper consumption by grey wolves and implications for ecosystems

Cited by 6 publications

References 15 publications

Strands of Connection: Livestock Grazing, Vegetation Density, and Orb-Weaver Spider Persistence

Strands of Connection: Livestock Grazing, Vegetation Density, and Orb-Weaver Spider Persistence

Resolving Food-Web Structure

Wolves, otters, ungulates, and a promising path for ecology

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