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Carrion Luggage  Native to the Americas, the turkey vulture (Cathartes aura) travels widely in search of sustenance. While usually foraging alone, it relies on other individuals of its species for companionship and mutual protection. Sometimes misunderstood, sometimes feared, sometimes shunned, it nevertheless performs an important role in the ecosystem. This scavenger bird is a marvel of efficiency. Rather than expend energy flapping its wings, it instead locates uplifting columns of air, and spirals within them in order to glide to greater heights. This behavior has been mistaken for opportunism, interpreted as if it is circling doomed terrestrial animals destined to be its next meal. In truth, the vulture takes advantage of these thermals to gain the altitude needed glide longer distances, flying not out of necessity, but for the joy of it. It also avoids the exertion necessary to capture live prey, preferring instead to feast upon that which is already dead. In this behavior, it resembles many humans. It is not what most of us would consider to be a pretty bird. While its habits are often off-putting, or even disgusting, to members of more fastidious species, the turkey vulture helps to keep the environment from being clogged with detritus. Hence its Latin binomial, which translates to English as "golden purifier." I rarely know where the winds will take me next, or what I might find there. The journey is the destination. |
| All that text in my blog intro? It's nice to have some verification. From Mongabay: The report focuses on Central America. As noted at the top of the article: "Unlike temperate regions with diverse scavenger communities, the neotropical forest system showed vultures as the primary vertebrate decomposers..." I had to look up "neotropical," and apparently it simply refers to New World tropical zones. Anyway, point is, I guess, that other regions have other scavengers besides vultures. “Absolutely disgusting, so grim, the worst fieldwork of my life, but also extremely rewarding in a very odd way,” said Julia Grootaers, describing her three months collecting data among rotting pig carcasses in Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula. I will not make a joke about her name. I will not make a joke about her name. I will not make a joke about her name. Their findings, published recently in the journal Ecology and Evolution, reveal that in the absence of vultures, carcasses take twice as long to decompose, and fly populations double, with significant implications for ecosystem health and potential disease transmission. It's probably good to note that there's more than one species of vulture  in Central America. The article includes pictures of some of them in the wild.The experiment consisted of 32 pig carcasses deployed in the southern Pacific region of Costa Rica, half in grassland and half in forest habitats. Eight carcasses were covered with exclusion cages for each habitat to prevent vulture access, while eight control carcasses remained uncovered. Half the experiment took place during the wet season and half during the dry season. While I'm no expert, that sounds like a fair methodology. One unexpected finding was how few vertebrate scavengers visited the carcasses, such as large cats or possums. One might consider that those mammals/marsupials could have an aversion to carrion that's been handled by humans, as these carcasses were. That could be an unrevealed confounding factor. (Also, it's "opossum." Respect the Powhatan.) Fly populations doubled at carcass sites without vultures, a finding with potential public health implications. Slower-decomposing carcasses could have important consequences for infectious and zoonotic (animal-transmitted) diseases in the tropics. Flies are also important contributors to the ecosystem, but unlike vultures, they tend to land on your food and spread germs there. This study is also significant because vulture research has almost exclusively concentrated on Old World species, those found in Africa, Asia and Europe. And apparently, New World vultures represent an entirely different clade than the Old World vultures, not very closely related at all. Anyway, point is, disgusting though we find their habits, vultures are cool. And yeah, I couldn't resist the pun in today's entry title. How could I? |
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