NDLI: Low individual-level dietary plasticity in an island-invasive generalist forager

Content Provider	Springer Nature Link
Author	Ruffi, Lise Russell, James C. Pisanu, Beît Caut, Stéphane Vidal, Eric
Copyright Year	2011
Abstract	The ability of invasive mammals to adjust their diet in response to new or variable resources is often proposed to explain their invasion success on islands with differing environmental conditions, especially islands with strong spatiotemporal changes in the nature and abundance of their resources. In this study, we investigated how habitat heterogeneity and seasonal fluctuation in resource quality affect dietary breadth and plasticity in an island-invasive rodent, the black rat Rattus rattus, on a small Mediterranean island. We tested for dietary plasticity of rats at both the individual and population levels by using traditional dietary and stable isotope analyses at successively increasing time scales, coupled with a long-term study of individual rats in three habitats of close proximity. Dietary and movement analyses both indicated that R. rattus is able to exploit a wide range of resources and habitats. However, dietary plasticity and habitat breadth were far narrower at the individual level. Results revealed that rats exclusively used resources found in their local habitat, and very few individuals moved among adjacent habitats in pursuit of higher-quality resources, despite those resources being abundant in their immediate environment. This counterintuitive finding suggests that intraspecific interactions must restrict rat mobility. Our results suggest that even on small islands, accessibility of patchy and high-quality resources to individuals from the entire population is not systematic. This result has important implications when quantifying invasive rodent impacts on patchily distributed species, especially when studies use indirect methods such as dietary analyses as a substitute for direct observations of predatory behavior.
Starting Page	535
Ending Page	548
Page Count	14
File Format	PDF
ISSN	14383896
Journal	Population Ecology
Volume Number	53
Issue Number	4
e-ISSN	1438390X
Language	English
Publisher	Springer Japan
Publisher Date	2011-02-26
Publisher Place	Japan
Access Restriction	One Nation One Subscription (ONOS)
Subject Keyword	Alien invasive rodents Capture–mark–recapture Dietary shift Invasion success Resource use Plant Sciences Forestry Behavioural Sciences Evolutionary Biology Zoology Ecology
Content Type	Text
Resource Type	Article
Subject	Ecology, Evolution, Behavior and Systematics

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