A recipe for scavenging in vertebrates - the natural history of a behaviour

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Date
2016-10-17
Authors
Kane, Adam
Healy, Kevin
Guillerme, Thomas
Ruxton, Graeme D.
Jackson, Andrew L.
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Wiley
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Abstract
Despite its prevalence, the importance of scavenging to carnivores is difficult to ascertain in modern day forms and impossible to study directly in extinct species. Yet, there are certain intrinsic and environmental features of a species that push it towards a scavenging lifestyle. These can be thought of as some of the principal parameters in optimal foraging theory namely, encounter rate and handling time. We use these components to highlight the morphologies and environments that would have been conducive to scavenging over geological time by focusing on the dominant vertebrate groups of the land, sea and air. The result is a synthesis on the natural history of scavenging. The features that make up our qualitative scale of scavenging can be applied to any given species and allow us to judge the likely importance of this foraging behaviour.
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Ornithology , Scavenging , Carrion , Vertebrates
Citation
Kane, A., Healy, K., GuillermE, T., Ruxton, G. D. and Jackson, A. L. (2016) ‘A recipe for scavenging in vertebrates - the natural history of a behaviour’, Ecography, 40(2), pp. 324-334. doi. 10.1111/ecog.02817
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© 2016 The Authors. Ecography © 2016 Nordic Society Oikos. This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Kane, A., Healy, K., GuillermE, T., Ruxton, G. D. and Jackson, A. L. (2016) ‘A recipe for scavenging in vertebrates - the natural history of a behaviour’, Ecography, 40(2), pp. 324-334. doi. 10.1111/ecog.02817, which is published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/ecog.02817. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving.