ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2020
Animal body size distribution influences the ratios of nutrients supplied to plants.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 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 21 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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Who cites it
21 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Meta-analysis shows that wild large herbivores shape ecosystem properties and promote spatial heterogeneity.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Pooled it
- Temperature-driven ontogenetic and morphological plasticity in Labeobarbus intermedius larvae from Lake Tana, Ethiopia.Journal of fish biology · 2026Article
- Species-specific dung characteristics and selective grazing jointly affect plant diversity in an experimental grassland community.Communications biology · 2026Article
- Mammal defaunation leads to biotic homogenization of plant communities in tropical rainforests.Ecology · 2026Article
- Integrating theory and empirical patterns: Fish body size distributions, life history traits, and environmental flows in streams.Science advances · 2025Article
- Consistent timelines, divergent end points: plant community change in multiple tallgrass nitrogen addition experiments.Oecologia · 2025Article
- Ecological and evolutionary influences on the elemental composition of birds.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2025Article
- Multi-Species Impacts of Invasive Opuntia Cacti on Mammal Habitat Use.Ecology letters · 2025Article
- Article
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- Diverse impacts of large herbivores.Nature ecology & evolution · 2024Article
- Geographic differences in body size distributions underlie food web connectance of tropical forest mammals.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Microbial community composition in the dung of five sympatric European herbivore species.Ecology and evolution · 2024Article
- The late-Quaternary megafauna extinctions: Patterns, causes, ecological consequences and implications for ecosystem management in the Anthropocene.Cambridge prisms. Extinction · 2024Review
- Mammal traits and soil biogeochemistry: Functional diversity relates to composition of soil organic matter.Ecology and evolution · 2023Article
- Smaller is better in competition for space.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Mammal and tree diversity accumulate different types of soil organic matter in the northern Amazon.iScience · 2023Article
- Body size-fecal nutrient patterns of mammalian herbivores.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Reply to Sitters and Olde Venterink: Untangling the relative importance of processes that influence fecal nutrient stoichiometry.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2021Article
- Predators and rainfall control spatial biogeochemistry in a landscape of fear.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Nutrients released through herbivore feces have the potential to influence plant-available nutrients and affect primary productivity. However, herbivore species use nutrients in set stoichiometric ratios that vary with body size. Such differences in the ratios at which nutrients are used leads to differences in the ratios at which nutrients are deposited through feces. Thus, local environmental factors that affect the average body size of an herbivore community (such as predation risk and food availability) influence the ratios at which fecal nutrients are supplied to plants. Here, we assess the relationship between herbivore body size and the nitrogen-to-phosphorus ratios of herbivore feces. We examine how shifts in the average body size of an herbivore community alter the ratios at which nitrogen and phosphorus are supplied to plants and test whether such differences in the stoichiometry of nutrient supply propagate through plants. We show that dung from larger-bodied herbivores contain lower quantities of phosphorus per unit mass and were higher in N:P ratio. We demonstrate that spatial heterogeneity in visibility (a proxy for predation risk and/or food availability) and rainfall (a proxy for food availability), did not affect the overall amount of feces deposited but led to changes in the average body size of the defecating community. Feces deposited in areas of higher rainfall and reduced visibility originated from larger herbivores and were higher in N:P ratios. This indicates that processes that change the size distribution of herbivore communities, such as predation or size-biased extinction, have the potential to alter the nutrient landscape for plants.
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