ArticleOecologia2020
Age and sex differences in numerical responses, dietary shifts, and total responses of a generalist predator to population dynamics of main prey.
Article in Oecologia, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. An erratum has been issued. Cited by 11 papers.
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
11 citing papers in PubMed.
- Avian predation has the strongest impact on vole survival during winter and spring in temperate grasslands.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Resource pulses shape seasonal and individual variation in the diet of an omnivorous carnivore.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- Hunting Site Behaviour of Sympatric Common BuzzardAnimals : an open access journal from MDPI · 2023Article
- Numerical Response of Owls to the Dampening of Small Mammal Population Cycles in Latvia.Life (Basel, Switzerland) · 2023Article
- The abundance of small mammals is positively linked to survival from nest depredation but negatively linked to local recruitment of a ground nesting precocial bird.Ecology and evolution · 2022Article
- Long-term trends in the body condition of parents and offspring of Tengmalm's owls under fluctuating food conditions and climate change.Scientific reports · 2021Article
- Raptor research during the COVID-19 pandemic provides invaluable opportunities for conservation biology.Biological conservation · 2021Article
- Estimating the long-term repeatability of food-hoarding behaviours in an avian predator.Biology letters · 2021Article
- A nomadic avian predator displays flexibility in prey choice during episodic outbreaks of rodents in arid Australia.Oecologia · 2021Article
- Predation risk in relation to brain size in alternative prey of pygmy owls varies depending on the abundance of main prey.PloS one · 2020Article
- A cross-taxonomic explanatory framework for mobbing behavior.Behavioral ecology : official journal of the International Society for Behavioral EcologyArticle
Corrections and comments
- Erratum issued
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Fluctuations in the abundance of main prey species might shape animal communities, by inducing numerical responses and dietary shifts in predators. Whether numerical responses and dietary shifts differ among individuals of different age and sex has so far gained little attention. These differences could affect how much predators consume main and alternative prey, thus causing variation in predation pressure on main and alternative prey species. We studied the effect of fluctuating main prey abundance (voles) in autumn on the age and sex composition of a food-hoarding population of Eurasian pygmy owls Glaucidium passerinum (327 individuals), and on the species composition of their food stores in western Finland during 2003-2017 (629 food stores). Numbers of yearlings (< 1-year old) of both sexes and adult (+ 1-year old) females increased with increasing vole abundance. During low vole abundance, adult owls stored more small birds and less small mammals than yearlings. Females stored more small mammals than males and showed a tendency to store less birds. The amount of consumed birds (the most important alternative prey), and in particular of crested, willow, great, and blue tits, increased with low vole densities. Our results show that numerical, functional, and total responses of pygmy owls, and probably also other vertebrate predators, to the availability of the main prey in winter are shaped by the age and sex composition of the predator population, which both show large spatio-temporal variation in boreal forests.
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