Ophiophagy and cannibalism in African vine snakes (Colubridae: <i>Thelotornis</i>)

Maritz, Robin; Conradie, Werner; Sardinha, Celso Inácio; Peto, Alberto; Chechene, Acácio Hélio Domingos; Maritz, Bryan

doi:10.1111/aje.12702

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

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“…Our approach has enormous potential beyond our usage of it, and we look forward to seeing its application in multiple ecological and evolutionary contexts. Even within our own dataset, we have only begun to explore the full potential of our data by addressing species-specific questions ( Layloo, Smith & Maritz, 2017 ; Maritz, Alexander & Maritz, 2019 ; Maritz et al., 2019 ; Smith et al, 2019 ). However, the dataset lends itself to addressing other questions such as seasonality in feeding and prey preference, intraguild predation, and the evolution of diet.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Sharing for science: high-resolution trophic interactions revealed rapidly by social media

Maritz

2020

PeerJ

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Discrete, ephemeral natural phenomena with low spatial or temporal predictability are incredibly challenging to study systematically. In ecology, species interactions, which constitute the functional backbone of ecological communities, can be notoriously difficult to characterise especially when taxa are inconspicuous and the interactions of interest (e.g., trophic events) occur infrequently, rapidly, or variably in space and time. Overcoming such issues has historically required significant time and resource investment to collect sufficient data, precluding the answering of many ecological and evolutionary questions. Here, we show the utility of social media for rapidly collecting observations of ephemeral ecological phenomena with low spatial and temporal predictability by using a Facebook group dedicated to collecting predation events involving reptiles and amphibians in sub-Saharan Africa. We collected over 1900 independent feeding observations using Facebook from 2015 to 2019 involving 83 families of predators and 129 families of prey. Feeding events by snakes were particularly well-represented with close to 1,100 feeding observations recorded. Relative to an extensive literature review spanning 226 sources and 138 years, we found that social media has provided snake dietary records faster than ever before in history with prey being identified to a finer taxonomic resolution and showing only modest concordance with the literature due to the number of novel interactions that were detected. Finally, we demonstrate that social media can outperform other citizen science image-based approaches (iNaturalist and Google Images) highlighting the versatility of social media and its ability to function as a citizen science platform.

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