Are all patches worth exploring? Foraging desert birds do not rely on environmental indicators of seed abundance at small scales.

ABSTRACT:

Background

Consumers should show strong spatial preferences when foraging in environments where food availability is highly heterogeneous and predictable. Postdispersal granivores face this scenario in most arid areas, where soil seed bank abundance and composition associates persistently with vegetation structure at small scales (decimetres to metres). Those environmental features should be exploited as useful pre-harvest information, at least to avoid patches predicted to be poor. However, we did not find the expected spatial association in the algarrobal of the central Monte desert by observing foraging seed-eating birds, a field technique influenced by how much they exploit visited patches. In this work we tested if the first stage of foraging by granivorous birds (patch visit,

SUBMITTER: Milesi FA 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC6582492 | biostudies-literature | 2019 Jun

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature