Food acquisition and predator avoidance in a Neotropical rodent
Section snippets
Site and Species
Fieldwork was conducted between October 2008 and May 2010 on Barro Colorado Island (BCI) in Panama (9°10′N, 79°51′W). BCI is a 16 km2 island located in the Gatun Lake of the Panama Canal, covered with a diverse semideciduous lowland moist tropical forest in different successional stages. Annual rainfall averages 2600 mm, with a marked dry period between December and April (Leigh, 1999). BCI has been protected from poaching since 1960 and has an almost complete mammal fauna (Wright, Gompper, &
Temporal Pattern of Predation Risk
Agouti activity (N = 29 390 camera trap observations, 2.6 per day) was almost exclusively during daytime, with 94.9% occurring between sunrise and sunset (Fig. 1a). By contrast, ocelot activity (N = 490 observations; 0.044 per day) was heavily biased but not limited to night-time and twilight, with 77.8% of observations occurring between sunset and sunrise (Fig. 1a). Activity overlap between the two species was largest around sunrise and sunset. The ratio of ocelot to agouti observations was 1:60
Discussion
Theory predicts that prey animals optimize the balance between food acquisition and predator avoidance by concentrating their foraging activity at times of relatively low predation risk, as much as their energy status permits (e.g. McNamara and Houston, 1986, Whitham and Mathis, 2000), but empirical evidence is scarce (but see Creel et al., 2008, Kotler et al., 2004, Mukherjee et al., 2009). Our study provides quantitative empirical evidence for avoidance of periods of high predation risk by a
Acknowledgments
We gratefully acknowledge field support from Meg Crofoot, Annemarie Winkelhagen, Torrey Rodgers, Matthew Mc Elroy, Sumana Serchan, Daniel Rasmussen and Jose Alejandro Silva, technical support with the ARTS system from Daniel Obando and Alejandro Ortega, and logistical support from Belkys Jimenez, Oris Acevedo and the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute. We thank Ron Ydenberg, Peter Bednekoff, Andrew King and four anonymous referees for constructive comments. Financial support was provided
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