Project description
Studying behavioural adaptations of scavengers
The ecological relationships among scavengers, predators, and their prey have a significant impact on their behaviour and population dynamics. However, the role of scavenging has been undervalued in food-web ecology. The EU-funded FFP-BSS project will investigate the behavioural adaptations of ravens, a facultative and kleptoparasitic scavenger, in relation to wolves, a predator, in Yellowstone National Park. With the recolonisation of wolves, there has been an increase in carrion availability. The project will test and assess whether the recolonisation of a top predator affects facultative scavengers at the population level. It will examine the behavioural adaptations of ravens, identify their foraging and scrounging strategies to exploit wolf kills, and generate a dataset by GPS-tracking the movements of ravens.
Objective
The ecological relationships between scavengers, predators and their prey can substantially influence their behaviour and population dynamics. Still, the impact of scavenging has been largely underestimated in food-web ecology. In this project I want to investigate the behavioural adaptations of a facultative and kleptoparasitic scavenger in relation to a predator. I aim to study one of the Northern hemisphere’s most widespread predator-scavenger system: wolves and ravens. In many areas wolves recolonize and increase the time period over which carrion is available and abundant overall. By using existing data on a large spatial scale, I will test and quantify for the first time, whether the recolonization of a top predator affects facultative scavengers like ravens at a population level; if this is the case, I will quantify these effects. Besides this, the main focus of this proposal is to identify which foraging and scrounging strategies ravens follow to locate and exploit wolf kills. I will create a unique dataset by GPS-tracking ravens in the Yellowstone National Park, in the same area where also wolves are intensively monitored and GPS-tracked. I will describe this predator-scavenger system and study the behavioural adaptations of ravens in relation to the wolves’ movements and predation. The collaboration with the Yellowstone wolf project - a natural ecosystem with minimal human impact - and the use of the latest tracking technology, the supervision by leading experts in animal movement analysis and my expertise on ravens lead to a synergic project, bigger than the sum of its parts, and will advance this field of research. Appropriate training, supervision and new collaborations will allow a significant improvement in my career perspective and enable me to become an independent researcher.
Fields of science
Programme(s)
Funding Scheme
MSCA-IF-EF-ST - Standard EFCoordinator
80539 Munchen
Germany