Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-27T08:36:48.209Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

On raptors and rodents: testing the ecological fidelity and spatiotemporal resolution of cave death assemblages

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 April 2016

Rebecca C. Terry
Rebecca C. Terry*
Affiliation:
Department of the Geophysical Sciences, University of Chicago, Chicago, Illinois 60637
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Natural accumulations of skeletal remains represent a valuable source of ecological data for paleontologists and neontologists alike. Use of these records requires a quantitative assessment of the degree to which potential biasing factors affect how accurately ecological information from the living community is recorded in the sedimentary record. This has been a major focus in recent years for taphonomists working with marine records, yet terrestrial systems have remained virtually unstudied—particularly communities of small-bodied taxa. Our ability to assess the potential origins and effects of postmortem bias in terrestrial skeletal assemblages (both modern and fossil) has therefore been limited. Predation is a common mechanism by which small-mammal skeletal remains are concentrated; raptors regurgitate the remains of their small-mammal prey in pellets rich in skeletal material, which accumulate below long-term roosting sites, especially in protected areas such as caves and rock shelters. Here I compare small-mammal death assemblages concentrated via owl predation at Two Ledges Chamber, a long-term owl cave roost in northwestern Nevada, with data from modern trapping surveys to evaluate (1) their ecological fidelity to the modern small-mammal community, (2) the effects of temporal variation and time-averaging (over months to centuries) on live-dead agreement, and (3) how spatial averaging affects the landscape-scale picture of the small-mammal community as reconstructed from dead remains. Despite potential obstacles to the recovery of ecological information from skeletal deposits generated via predation, I find high live-dead agreement across all ecological metrics and all temporal comparisons. I also find that the effects of time-averaging (specifically increased species richness of the death assemblage) become significant only at the century scale. Finally, I combine a mixing model approach with a principal coordinates analysis to show that the owls at Two Ledges Chamber sample from all habitats present in the immediate vicinity of the cave, producing a high-fidelity snapshot of the community that is spatially integrated at the local landscape scale.

Type
Articles
Information
Paleobiology , Volume 36 , Issue 1 , Winter 2010 , pp. 137 - 160
Copyright
Copyright © The Paleontological Society 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

Literature Cited

Alroy, J. 2000. Successive approximations of diversity curves: ten more years in the library. Geology 28:1023–1026.Google Scholar
Andrews, P. 1990. Owls, caves and fossils. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Barnosky, A. D., Hadly, E. A., and Bell, C. J. 2003. Mammalian response to global warming on varied temporal scales. Journal of Mammalogy 84:354–368.2.0.CO;2>CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Behrensmeyer, A. K. 1978. Taphonomic and ecologic information from bone weathering. Paleobiology 4:150–162.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Behrensmeyer, A. K., and Dechant Boaz, D. E. 1980. The recent bones of Amboseli Park, Kenya. Pp. 72–92 in Behrensmeyer, A. K., and Hill, A. P., eds. Fossils in the making. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Benson, L., Kashgarian, M., Rye, R., Lund, S., Paillet, F., Smoot, J., Kester, C., Mensing, S., Meko, D., and Lindstrom, S. 2002. Holocene multidecadal and multicentennial droughts affecting northern California and Nevada. Quaternary Science Reviews 21:659–682.Google Scholar
Bent, A. C. 1961. Life histories of North American birds of prey, Part 2. Orders Falconiformes and Strigiformes (reprinted from 1938 edition). Dover, New York.Google Scholar
Best, D. J., and Roberts, D. E. 1975. Algorithm AS 89: the upper tail probabilities of Spearman's rho . Applied Statistics 24:377–379.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Briggs, R. W., Wesnousky, S. G., and Adams, K. D. 2005. Late Pleistocene and late Holocene lake highstands in the Pyramid Lake subbasin of Lake Lahontan, Nevada, USA. Quaternary Research 64:257–263.Google Scholar
Brown, J. H. 1971. Mammals on mountaintops: nonequilibrium insular biogeography. American Naturalist 105:467–478.Google Scholar
Brown, J. H. 1995. Macroecology. University of Chicago Press, Chicago.Google Scholar
Bush, A. M. and Bambach, R. K. 2004. Did alpha diversity increase during the Phanerozoic? Lifting the veils of taphonomic, latitudinal, and environmental biases. Journal of Geology 112:625–642.Google Scholar
Craighead, J. J., and Craighead, F. C. J. 1956. Hawks, owls and wildlife. Wildlife Management Institute, Washington D.C. Google Scholar
Davis, J. C. 2002. Statistics and data analysis in geology. Wiley, New York.Google Scholar
Drickamer, L. C., and Mikesic, D. G. 1993. Differences in trapping and killing efficiency of Sherman, Victor, and Museum-Special traps for house mice. American Midland Naturalist 130:397–401.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Feranec, R. S., Hadly, E. A., and Paytan, A. 2007. Determining landscape use of Holocene mammals using strontium isotopes. Oecologia 153:943–950.Google Scholar
Gannon, W. L., R. S. Sikes, and W. L. Gannon, R. S. Sikes, and the Animal Care and Use Committee of the American Society of Mammalogists. 2007. Guidelines of the American Society of Mammalogists for the use of wild animals in research. Journal of Mammalogy 88:809–823.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gotelli, N. J., and Ellison, A. M. 2004. A primer of ecological statistics. Sinauer, Sunderland, Mass. Google Scholar
Grayson, D. K. 1981. A critical view of the use of archaeological vertebrates in paleoenvironmental reconstruction. Journal of Ethnobiology 1:28–38.Google Scholar
Grayson, D. K. 1993. The desert's past: a natural prehistory of the Great Basin. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington D.C. Google Scholar
Grayson, D. K. 2000. Mammalian responses to middle Holocene climatic change in the Great Basin of the western United States. Journal of Biogeography 27:181–192.Google Scholar
Hadly, E. A. 1996. Influence of late-Holocene climate on northern Rocky Mountain mammals. Quaternary Research 46:298–310.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hadly, E. A. 1999. Fidelity of terrestrial vertebrate fossils to a modern ecosystem. Palaeogeography Palaeoclimatology Palaeoecology 149:389–409.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hockett, B. S. 1991. Toward distinguishing human and raptor patterning on leporid bones. American Antiquity 56:667–679.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hockett, B. S. 1993. Taphonomy of the leporid bones from Hogup Cave, Utah: implications for cultural continuity in the eastern Great Basin. . University of Nevada, Reno.Google Scholar
Hurlbert, S. H. 1971. The nonconcept of species diversity: a critique and alternative parameters. Ecology 52:577–586.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Jaksic, F. M., Feinsinger, P., and Jimenez, J. E. 1996. Ecological redundancy and long-term dynamics of vertebrate predators in semiarid Chile. Conservation Biology 10:252–262.Google Scholar
Jaksic, F. M., Torres-Mura, J. C., Cornelius, C., and Marquet, P. A. 1999. Small mammals of the Atacama Desert (Chile). Journal of Arid Environments 42:129–135.Google Scholar
Jorgensen, E. E., Sell, S. M., and Demarais, S. 1998. Barn owl prey use in Chihuahuan Desert foothills. The Southwestern Naturalist 43:53–56.Google Scholar
Kidwell, S. M. 2001. Preservation of species abundance in marine death assemblages. Science 294:1091–1094.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kidwell, S. M. 2002a. Time-averaged molluscan death assemblages: palimpsests of richness, snapshots of abundance. Geology 30:803–806.Google Scholar
Kidwell, S. M. 2002b. Ecological fidelity of abundance data from time-averaged fossil assemblages: good news from the dead. Pp. 173–178 in De Renzi, M., Alonso, M. V. P., Belinchon, M., Penalver, E., Montoya, P., and Marquez-Aliaga, A., eds. Current topics on taphonomy and fossilization. Ajuntament de Valencia, Valencia, Spain. Google Scholar
Kidwell, S. M. 2007. Discordance between living and death assemblages as evidence for anthropogenic ecological change. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences USA 104:17701–17706.CrossRefGoogle ScholarPubMed
Kidwell, S. M., and Bosence, W. J. 1991. Taphonomy and time-averaging of marine shelly faunas. Pp. 115–209 in Allison, P. A. and Briggs, D. E. G., eds. Taphonomy: releasing the data locked in the fossil record. Plenum, New York.Google Scholar
Kidwell, S. M., and Flessa, K. W. 1995. The quality of the fossil record: populations, species, and communities. Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics 26:269–299.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kowalewski, M., Serrano, G. E. A., Flessa, K. W., and Goodfriend, G. A. 2000. Dead delta's former productivity: two trillion shells at the mouth of the Colorado River. Geology 28:1059–1062.Google Scholar
Lillegraven, J. A. 1972. Ordinal and familial diversity of Cenozoic mammals. Taxon 21:261–274.Google Scholar
Lyman, R. L., and Lyman, R. J. 2003. Lessons from temporal variation in the mammalian faunas from two collections of owl pellets in Columbia County, Washington. International Journal of Osteoarchaeology 13:150–156.Google Scholar
Magurran, A. E. 2004. Measuring biological diversity. Blackwell, Maiden, Mass. Google Scholar
Marti, C. D. 1988. A long-term study of food-niche dynamics in the common barn-owl: comparisons within and between populations. Canadian Journal of Zoology 66:1803–1812.Google Scholar
Mellet, J. S. 1974. Scatological origin of microvertebrate fossil accumulations. Science 185:349–350.Google Scholar
Moon, E. L. 1940. Notes on hawk and owl pellet formation and identification. Transactions of the Kansas Academy of Science 43:457–466.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
National Research Council. 2005. The geological record of ecological dynamics. National Academies Press, Washington D.C. Google Scholar
Nowak, C. L., Nowak, R. S., Tausch, R. J., and Wigand, P. E. 1994. Tree and shrub dynamics in northwestern Great-Basin woodland and shrub steppe during the late-Pleistocene and Holocene. American Journal of Botany 81:265–277.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olszewski, T. D. 2004. A unified mathematical framework for the measurement of richness and evenness within and among multiple communities. Oikos 104:377–387.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Olszewski, T. D., and Kidwell, S. M. 2007. The preservational fidelity of evenness in molluscan death assemblages. Paleobiology 33:1–23.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Parisi, M., ed. 2003. Atlas of the biodiversity of California. California Department of Fish and Game, Sacramento.Google Scholar
Phillips, D. L., and Gregg, J. W. 2003. Source partitioning using stable isotopes: coping with too many sources. Oecologia 136:261–269.Google Scholar
Pizzimenti, J. J. 1979. Relative effectiveness of 3 types of traps for small mammals in some Peruvian rodent communities. Acta Theriologica 24:351–361.Google Scholar
Porder, S., Paytan, A., and Hadly, E. A. 2003. Mapping the origin of faunal assemblages using strontium isotopes. Paleobiology 29:197–204.Google Scholar
R Development Core Team. 2007. R: a language and environment for statistical computing. R Foundation for Statistical Computing, Vienna. ISBN 3-900051-07-0. http://www.R-project.org.Google Scholar
Raup, D. M. 1975. Taxonomic diversity estimation using rarefaction. Paleobiology 1:333–342.Google Scholar
Reed, D. N. 2005. Taphonomic implications of roosting behavior and trophic habits in two species of African owl. Journal of Archaeological Science 32:1669–1676.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Reed, D. N. 2007. Serengeti micromammals and their implications for Olduvai paleoenvironments. Pp. 217–255 in Bobe, R., Alemseged, Z., and Behrensmeyer, A. K., eds. Hominin environments in the East African Pliocene: an assessment of the faunal evidence. Springer, New York.Google Scholar
Rhode, D., and Madsen, D. B. 1995. Late Wisconsin early Holocene vegetation in the Bonneville Basin. Quaternary Research 44:246–256.Google Scholar
Schmitt, D. N., Madsen, D. B., and Lupo, K. D. 2002. Small-mammal data on early and middle Holocene climates and biotic communities in the Bonneville Basin, USA. Quaternary Research 58:255–260.Google Scholar
Sepkoski, J. J. Jr. 1988. Alpha, beta, or gamma: where does all the diversity go? Paleobiology 14:221–234.Google Scholar
Sept, J. M. 1994. Bone distribution in semi-arid riverine habitats in eastern Zaire: implications for the interpretation of faunal assemblages at early archaeological sites. Journal of Archaeological Science 21:217–235 Google Scholar
Sokal, R. R., and Rohlf, F. J. 1995. Biometry: the principles and practice of statistics in biological research, 3d ed. W. H. Freeman, New York.Google Scholar
Swetnam, T. W., Allen, C. D., and Betancourt, J. L. 1999. Applied historical ecology: using the past to manage for the future. Ecological Applications 9:1189–1206.Google Scholar
Tappen, M. 1995. Savanna ecology and natural bone deposition—implications for early hominid site formation, hunting, and scavenging. Current Anthropology 36:223–260.Google Scholar
Terry, R. C. 2007. Inferring predator identity from skeletal damage of small-mammal prey remains. Evolutionary Ecology Research 9:199–219.Google Scholar
Terry, R. C. 2008a. Raptors, rodents, and paleoecology: recovering ecological baselines from Great Basin caves. . University of Chicago, Chicago.Google Scholar
Terry, R. C. 2008b. Modeling the effects of predation, prey cycling, and time averaging on relative abundance in raptor-generated small-mammal death assemblages. Palaios 23:402–410.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Torre, I., Arrizabalaga, A., and Flaquer, C. 2004. Three methods for assessing richness and composition of small mammal communities. Journal of Mammalogy 85:524–530.Google Scholar
Vigne, J.-D., and Valladas, H. E. 1996. Small mammal fossil assemblages as indicators of environmental change in northern Corsica during the last 2500 years. Journal of Archaeological Science 23:199–215.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Western, D., and Behrensmeyer, A. K. 2009. Bone assemblages track animal community structure over 40 years in an African savanna ecosystem. Science 324:1061–1064.Google Scholar
Wilson, D. E., Cole, F. R., Nichils, J. D., Rudran, R., and Foster, M. S. 1996. Measuring and monitoring biological diversity: standard methods for mammals. Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington, D.C. Google Scholar