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      Vertical foraging shifts in Hawaiian forest birds in response to invasive rat removal

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          Abstract

          Worldwide, native species increasingly contend with the interacting stressors of habitat fragmentation and invasive species, yet their combined effects have rarely been examined. Direct negative effects of invasive omnivores are well documented, but the indirect effects of resource competition or those caused by predator avoidance are unknown. Here we isolated and examined the independent and interactive effects of invasive omnivorous Black rats ( Rattus rattus) and forest fragment size on the interactions between avian predators and their arthropod prey. Our study examines whether invasive omnivores and ecosystem fragment size impact: 1) the vertical distribution of arthropod species composition and abundance, and 2) the vertical profile of foraging behaviors of five native and two non-native bird species found in our study system. We predicted that the reduced edge effects and greater structural complexity and canopy height of larger fragments would limit the total and proportional habitat space frequented by rats and thus limit their impact on both arthropod biomass and birds’ foraging behavior. We experimentally removed invasive omnivorous Black rats across a 100-fold (0.1 to 12 ha) size gradient of forest fragments on Hawai‘i Island, and paired foraging observations of forest passerines with arthropod sampling in the 16 rat-removed and 18 control fragments. Rat removal was associated with shifts in the vertical distribution of arthropod biomass, irrespective of fragment size. Bird foraging behavior mirrored this shift, and the impact of rat removal was greater for birds that primarily eat fruit and insects compared with those that consume nectar. Evidence from this model study system indicates that invasive rats indirectly alter the feeding behavior of native birds, and consequently impact multiple trophic levels. This study suggests that native species can modify their foraging behavior in response to invasive species removal and presumably arrival through behavioral plasticity.

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          Population Ecology of Some Warblers of Northeastern Coniferous Forests

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            Interactive effects of habitat modification and species invasion on native species decline.

            Different components of global environmental change are often studied and managed independently, but mounting evidence points towards complex non-additive interaction effects between drivers of native species decline. Using the example of interactions between land-use change and biotic exchange, we develop an interpretive framework that will enable global change researchers to identify and discriminate between major interaction pathways. We formalise a distinction between numerically mediated versus functionally moderated causal pathways. Despite superficial similarity of their effects, numerical and functional pathways stem from fundamentally different mechanisms of action and have fundamentally different consequences for conservation management. Our framework is a first step toward building a better quantitative understanding of how interactions between drivers might mitigate or exacerbate the net effects of global environmental change on biotic communities in the future.
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              Molecular identification of prey in predator diets.

              In many situations prey choice by predators in the field cannot be established or quantified using direct observation. The remains of some prey may be visually identified in the guts and faeces of predators but not all predators ingest such hard remains and even those that do consume them may also ingest soft-bodies prey that leave no recognizable remnants. The result is, at best, a biased picture of prey choice. A range of molecular techniques and applications are reviewed that allow prey remains to be identified, often to the species and even stage level. These techniques, all of which are still in use, include enzyme electrophoresis, a range of immunological approaches using polyclonal and monoclonal antibodies to detect protein epitopes, and recently developed polymerase chain reaction (PCR)-based methods for detecting prey DNA. Analyses may be postmortem, on invertebrate and vertebrate predators collected from the field, or noninvasive assays of the remains in regurgitated bird pellets or vertebrate faeces. It was concluded that although monoclonal antibodies are currently the most effective method in use today, PCR-based techniques have proved to be highly effective and versatile in recent laboratory trials and are likely to rapidly displace all other approaches.
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                Author and article information

                Contributors
                Role: Formal analysisRole: InvestigationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Data curationRole: InvestigationRole: MethodologyRole: Project administrationRole: Writing – original draftRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Data curationRole: Formal analysisRole: Funding acquisitionRole: ResourcesRole: SupervisionRole: VisualizationRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: ConceptualizationRole: Funding acquisitionRole: ResourcesRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Funding acquisitionRole: ResourcesRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Data curationRole: InvestigationRole: ResourcesRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Investigation
                Role: MethodologyRole: ResourcesRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Funding acquisitionRole: MethodologyRole: ResourcesRole: SupervisionRole: Writing – review & editing
                Role: Editor
                Journal
                PLoS One
                PLoS ONE
                plos
                plosone
                PLoS ONE
                Public Library of Science (San Francisco, CA USA )
                1932-6203
                24 September 2018
                2018
                : 13
                : 9
                : e0202869
                Affiliations
                [1 ] Department of Entomology, University of Maryland, College Park, Maryland, United States of America
                [2 ] School of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, Michigan Technological University, Houghton, Michigan, United States of America
                [3 ] Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry, United States Department of Agriculture, United States Forest Service, Hilo, Hawai‛i, United States of America
                [4 ] Department of Biology, Stanford University, Stanford, California, United States of America
                [5 ] Smithsonian Conservation Biology Institute, Smithsonian Institution, Front Royal, Virginia, United States of America
                Auburn University, UNITED STATES
                Author notes

                Competing Interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

                [¤a]

                Current address: Department of Entomology, University of California Riverside, Riverside, California, United States of America

                [¤b]

                Current address: Department of Biology, Wheaton College, Norton, Massachusetts, United States of America

                Author information
                http://orcid.org/0000-0001-8842-5289
                Article
                PONE-D-16-34308
                10.1371/journal.pone.0202869
                6152863
                30248110
                bfba09de-6628-4077-afc1-c0cdffa49f30

                This is an open access article, free of all copyright, and may be freely reproduced, distributed, transmitted, modified, built upon, or otherwise used by anyone for any lawful purpose. The work is made available under the Creative Commons CC0 public domain dedication.

                History
                : 26 August 2016
                : 12 August 2018
                Page count
                Figures: 5, Tables: 1, Pages: 19
                Funding
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001, National Science Foundation;
                Award ID: DEB–1020412
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001, National Science Foundation;
                Award ID: DEB–1020007
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: funder-id http://dx.doi.org/10.13039/100000001, National Science Foundation;
                Award ID: DEB–1019928
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: Terman Fellowship of Stanford University
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: Michigan Technological University Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship
                Award Recipient :
                Funded by: USDA Forest Service Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry
                Award Recipient :
                Funding was provided by the National Science Foundation (DEB–1020412 to T. Fukami, C. P. Giardina; DEB–1020007 to D. S. Gruner; DEB-1240774 to D. S. Gruner and DEB–1019928 to D. J. Flaspohler), the Terman Fellowship of Stanford University to T. Fukami, and the Michigan Technological University Summer Undergraduate Research Fellowship program. The USDA Forest Service Institute of Pacific Islands Forestry provided funding support for implementation and maintenance of the larger study and for some of the resighting work. Any use of trade, firm, or product names is for descriptive purposes only and does not imply endorsement by the U.S. Government. None of the funders had any input into the content of the manuscript. None of the funders required their approval of the manuscript before submission or publication.
                Categories
                Research Article
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Organisms
                Eukaryota
                Animals
                Vertebrates
                Amniotes
                Birds
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Behavior
                Animal Behavior
                Foraging
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Zoology
                Animal Behavior
                Foraging
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Organisms
                Eukaryota
                Animals
                Invertebrates
                Arthropoda
                Ecology and Environmental Sciences
                Species Colonization
                Invasive Species
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Ecology
                Ecosystems
                Forests
                Ecology and Environmental Sciences
                Ecology
                Ecosystems
                Forests
                Ecology and Environmental Sciences
                Terrestrial Environments
                Forests
                Research and Analysis Methods
                Experimental Organism Systems
                Model Organisms
                Rats
                Research and Analysis Methods
                Model Organisms
                Rats
                Research and Analysis Methods
                Experimental Organism Systems
                Animal Models
                Rats
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Organisms
                Eukaryota
                Animals
                Vertebrates
                Amniotes
                Mammals
                Rodents
                Rats
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Organisms
                Eukaryota
                Plants
                Trees
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Behavior
                Animal Behavior
                Biology and Life Sciences
                Zoology
                Animal Behavior
                Custom metadata
                The data set for this study has been uploaded to a public repository and is available at: https://doi.org/10.6086/D1X675.

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