Before he disappears back to Australia again, he'll give a seminar at our EXEB meeting on Tuesday, April 18th. While his research interest has recently branched out to cancer in the Tasmanian devil (see e.g. here and here), he'll tell us about predator-prey dynamics between snakes and rats!
Floods and famine: climate-induced collapse of a tropical predator-prey community
Beata Ujvari and Thomas Madsen
Summary
1.
Will
climate change threaten wildlife populations by gradual shifts in mean
conditions, or by increased frequency of extreme weather events?
2.
Based
on long-term data (from 1991 to 2014), the aim of the present study was to
analyze and compare the sensitivity of predator-prey demography to extreme
climatic events versus normal, albeit highly variable, annual deviations in
climatic conditions in the Australian wet-dry tropics.
3.
From
1991 to 2005, predators (water pythons, Liasis fuscus) and their main prey (dusky rats, Rattus colletti) showed significant climate-driven fluctuations in numbers.
4.
These fluctuations were,
however, trivial compared to the impact of two massive but brief deluges in
2007 and 2011, which virtually eliminated the dusky rats. The two floods resulted in the pythons
experiencing an unprecedented famine in 7 out of the last 8 years causing a
massive shift in python demography i.e. a significant reduction in feeding
rates, reproductive output, growth rates, relative body mass, survival, mean
body length and numbers (from
3173 in 1992 to 96 in 2013).
5.
Our results demonstrate that
attempts to predict faunal responses to climate change, even if based on
long-term studies, may be doomed to failure.
Consequently,
biologists may need to confront the uncomfortable truth that
increased frequency of brief unpredictable bouts of extreme weather can
influence populations far more than gradual deviations in mean climatic
conditions.
There will be fika!
Time: Tuesday, April 18, 10.00
Locale: "Darwin", 2nd floor (Ecology Building)
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