Central place foragers, prey depletion halos, and how behavioral niche partitioning promotes consumer coexistence.

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State: Public
Version: Final published version
License: CC BY-NC 4.0
Serval ID
serval:BIB_CEB4369C180C
Type
Article: article from journal or magazin.
Collection
Publications
Institution
Title
Central place foragers, prey depletion halos, and how behavioral niche partitioning promotes consumer coexistence.
Journal
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America
Author(s)
Rueffler C., Lehmann L.
ISSN
1091-6490 (Electronic)
ISSN-L
0027-8424
Publication state
Published
Issued date
12/11/2024
Peer-reviewed
Oui
Volume
121
Number
46
Pages
e2411780121
Language
english
Notes
Publication types: Journal Article
Publication Status: ppublish
Abstract
Many seabirds congregate in large colonies for breeding, a time when they are central place foragers. An influential idea in seabird ecology posits that competition during breeding results in an area of reduced prey availability around colonies, a phenomenon known as Ashmole's halo, and that this limits colony size. This idea has gained empirical support, including the finding that species coexisting within a colony might be able to do so by foraging on a single prey species but at different distances. Here, we provide a comprehensive mathematical model for central place foragers exploiting a single prey in a two-dimensional environment, where the prey distribution is the result of intrinsic birth and death, movement in space, and mortality due to foraging birds (we also consider a variant tailored toward colonial social insects). Bird predation at different distances occurs according to an ideal free foraging distribution that maximizes prey delivery under flight and search costs. We fully characterize the birds' ideal free distribution and the prey distribution it generates. Our results show that prey depletion halos around breeding colonies are a robust phenomenon and that the birds' ideal free distribution is sensitive to prey movement. Furthermore, coexistence of several seabird species on a single prey easily emerges through behavioral niche partitioning whenever trait differences between species entail trade-offs between efficiently exploiting a scarce prey close to the colony and a more abundant prey far away. Such behavioral-based coexistence-inducing mechanism should generalize to other habitat and diet choice scenarios.
Keywords
Animals, Predatory Behavior/physiology, Birds/physiology, Ecosystem, Feeding Behavior/physiology, Models, Biological, Ashmole’s halo, ideal free distribution, predator-prey, seabirds, social insects
Pubmed
Web of science
Create date
17/06/2024 11:57
Last modification date
03/12/2024 7:08
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