The DOI matches its Crossref record; 30 of the 30 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Fear of large carnivores causes a trophic cascade
Open accessAbstract
The fear large carnivores inspire, independent of their direct killing of prey, may itself cause cascading effects down food webs potentially critical for conserving ecosystem function, particularly by affecting large herbivores and mesocarnivores. However, the evidence of this has been repeatedly challenged because it remains experimentally untested. Here we show that experimentally manipulating fear itself in free-living mesocarnivore (raccoon) populations using month-long playbacks of large carnivore vocalizations caused just such cascading effects, reducing mesocarnivore foraging to the benefit of the mesocarnivore’s prey, which in turn affected a competitor and prey of the mesocarnivore’s prey. We further report that by experimentally restoring the fear of large carnivores in our study system, where most large carnivores have been extirpated, we succeeded in reversing this mesocarnivore’s impacts. We suggest that our results reinforce the need to conserve large carnivores given the significant “ecosystem service” the fear of them provides.
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Cites
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Cited by
Diel predator activity drives a dynamic landscape of fear
Kohl, M. T., Stahler, D. R., Metz, M. C., Forester, J. D., Kauffman, M. J., Varley, N., White, P. J., Smith, D. W., & MacNulty, D. R. (2018) · Ecological Monographs · doi:10.1002/ecm.1313 · Cited by 304
The cognition of ‘nuisance’ species
Barrett, L. P., Stanton, L. A., & Benson-Amram, S. (2019) · Animal Behaviour · doi:10.1016/j.anbehav.2018.05.005 · Cited by 166
Metadata
- Authors
- Suraci, J. P., Clinchy, M., Dill, L. M., Roberts, D., & Zanette, L. Y.
- Venue
- Nature Communications
- Published
- 2016-02-23
- Volume
- 7
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 10698-10698
- ISSN
- 2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
- OpenAlex
- W2280527828
- Cited by
- 488
- References
- 30
- FWCI
- 34.07
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
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- Suraci, J. P., Clinchy, M., Dill, L. M., Roberts, D., & Zanette, L. Y. (2016). Fear of large carnivores causes a trophic cascade. Nature Communications. https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10698
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Bibliographic data: Semantic Scholar, OpenAlex, Crossref.
Contains information from the Semantic Scholar Academic Graph Datasets, made available under the ODC Attribution License (ODC-BY 1.0).
Semantic Scholar’s data is described in: Kinney, R., et al. (2023). The Semantic Scholar Open Data Platform. arXiv:2301.10140.
