Trophic niche overlap and wild ungulate consumption by red fox and wolf in a mountain area in Italy

Bassi, Elena; Donaggio, Emanuela; Marcon, Andrea; Scandura, Massimo; Apollonio, Marco

doi:10.1016/j.mambio.2011.12.002

Cited by 50 publications

(35 citation statements)

References 37 publications

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“…Even in the absence of direct killing, it is plausible that wolves may still behaviourally suppress red foxes through harassment, injury and fear of encounters. Literature suggests minimal dietary overlap between the two carnivores (Bassi et al 2012; Patalano and Lovari 1993). Competition for landscape features such as den sites, scavenging opportunities and kleptoparasitism however, could still yield negative interactions.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear, foraging and olfaction: how mesopredators avoid costly interactions with apex predators

et al. 2018

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Where direct killing is rare and niche overlap low, sympatric carnivores may appear to coexist without conflict. Interference interactions, harassment and injury from larger carnivores may still pose a risk to smaller mesopredators. Foraging theory suggests that animals should adjust their behaviour accordingly to optimise foraging efficiency and overall fitness, trading off harvest rate with costs to fitness. The foraging behaviour of red foxes, Vulpes vulpes, was studied with automated cameras and a repeated measures giving-up density (GUD) experiment where olfactory risk cues were manipulated. In Plitvice Lakes National Park, Croatia, red foxes increased GUDs by 34% and quitting harvest rates by 29% in response to wolf urine. In addition to leaving more food behind, foxes also responded to wolf urine by spending less time visiting food patches each day and altering their behaviour in order to compensate for the increased risk when foraging from patches. Thus, red foxes utilised olfaction to assess risk and experienced foraging costs due to the presence of a cue from gray wolves, Canis lupus. This study identifies behavioural mechanisms which may enable competing predators to coexist, and highlights the potential for additional ecosystem service pathways arising from the behaviour of large carnivores. Given the vulnerability of large carnivores to anthropogenic disturbance, a growing human population and intensifying resource consumption, it becomes increasingly important to understand ecological processes so that land can be managed appropriately.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (10.1007/s00442-018-4133-3) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Fear, foraging and olfaction: how mesopredators avoid costly interactions with apex predators

et al. 2018

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“…Ecologists must then employ several indirect methods to determine diet composition. These methods include the analyses of stomach contents [3,4], scats [5–7], regurgitations [8] and pellets [9,10]. Nevertheless, all these indirect methods rely on the recovery and identification of hard items (e.g.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bias in Diet Determination: Incorporating Traditional Methods in Bayesian Mixing Models

et al. 2013

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There are not “universal methods” to determine diet composition of predators. Most traditional methods are biased because of their reliance on differential digestibility and the recovery of hard items. By relying on assimilated food, stable isotope and Bayesian mixing models (SIMMs) resolve many biases of traditional methods. SIMMs can incorporate prior information (i.e. proportional diet composition) that may improve the precision in the estimated dietary composition. However few studies have assessed the performance of traditional methods and SIMMs with and without informative priors to study the predators’ diets. Here we compare the diet compositions of the South American fur seal and sea lions obtained by scats analysis and by SIMMs-UP (uninformative priors) and assess whether informative priors (SIMMs-IP) from the scat analysis improved the estimated diet composition compared to SIMMs-UP. According to the SIMM-UP, while pelagic species dominated the fur seal’s diet the sea lion’s did not have a clear dominance of any prey. In contrast, SIMM-IP’s diets compositions were dominated by the same preys as in scat analyses. When prior information influenced SIMMs’ estimates, incorporating informative priors improved the precision in the estimated diet composition at the risk of inducing biases in the estimates. If preys isotopic data allow discriminating preys’ contributions to diets, informative priors should lead to more precise but unbiased estimated diet composition. Just as estimates of diet composition obtained from traditional methods are critically interpreted because of their biases, care must be exercised when interpreting diet composition obtained by SIMMs-IP. The best approach to obtain a near-complete view of predators’ diet composition should involve the simultaneous consideration of different sources of partial evidence (traditional methods, SIMM-UP and SIMM-IP) in the light of natural history of the predator species so as to reliably ascertain and weight the information yielded by each method.

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“…Roe deer and wild boar Sus scrofa are the only ubiquitous ungulates in the study area. Natural predators of roe deer are grey wolf Canis lupus and red fox Vulpes vulpes (Bassi et al ., ). In the OAC, hunting activities are permanently banned, whereas in the rest of the study area, wild boar hunting with hounds and roe deer stalking from fixed high seats are permitted (Grignolio et al ., ).…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 97%

Do relatives like to stay closer? Spatial organization and genetic relatedness in a mountain roe deer population

et al. 2015

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The fine-scale genetic structure of mammal populations arises from the social and spatial behaviour of individuals. In wild ungulates gene flow is usually mediated by males, being the dispersing sex. The roe deer Capreolus capreolus represents an exception: males and females disperse in similar proportions as juveniles, but are subsequently mostly sedentary as adults, while mechanisms for inbreeding avoidance are more complex and not fully known. We investigated the seasonal variation in the relationship between genetic relatedness and spatial behaviour in a sample of 69 roe deer, monitored from 2002 to 2010 in a high-density population in Italy. Genetic and spatial analyses, based on individual positions, did not reveal any population structure, neither in the whole sample, nor in the two sexes separately. Our results are coherent with the absence of a sex bias in roe deer dispersal and suggest the existence of a high gene flow across a continuous forest habitat, thus preventing the onset of population structuring at a local scale. We found that genetic relatedness tended to increase with home range proximity, but mostly in winter. Nevertheless, when the extent of overlap between seasonal home ranges with respect to genetic relatedness was considered, males and females seemed to preferably share their home range with relatives of the same sex, reducing the overlap with relatives of the opposite sex during the rutting period. We conclude that home range rearrangements during the breeding season may afford a certain level of spatial segregation between closely related potential mates, thus reducing inbreeding risk.

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Trophic niche overlap and wild ungulate consumption by red fox and wolf in a mountain area in Italy

Cited by 50 publications

References 37 publications

Fear, foraging and olfaction: how mesopredators avoid costly interactions with apex predators

Fear, foraging and olfaction: how mesopredators avoid costly interactions with apex predators

Bias in Diet Determination: Incorporating Traditional Methods in Bayesian Mixing Models

Do relatives like to stay closer? Spatial organization and genetic relatedness in a mountain roe deer population

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