Disappearance of an ecosystem engineer, the white-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari), leads to density compensation and ecological release.

ABSTRACT: Given the rate of biodiversity loss, there is an urgent need to understand community-level responses to extirpation events, with two prevailing hypotheses. On one hand, the loss of an apex predator leads to an increase in primary prey species, triggering a trophic cascade of other changes within the community, while density compensation and ecological release can occur because of reduced competition for resources and absence of direct aggression. White-lipped peccary (Tayassu pecari-WLP), a species that typically co-occurs with collared peccary (Pecari tajacu), undergo major population crashes-often taking 20 to 30-years for populations to recover. Using a temporally replicated camera trapping dataset, in both a pre- and post- WLP crash, we explore how WLP disappearance alters the structur

SUBMITTER: Whitworth A 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC9464176 | biostudies-literature | 2022 Aug

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature