COEXISTENCE OF TEMPORALLY PARTITIONED SPINY MICE: ROLES OF HABITAT STRUCTURE AND FORAGING BEHAVIOR

By Menna E. Jones, Y. Mandelik, T. Dayan. 2001

122 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Two coexisting species of spiny mice in rocky deserts in Israel temporally partition activity in opposite parts of the diel cycle. Acomys cahirinus is nocturnal and A. russatus is diurnal, although it becomes nocturnal if its congener is experimentally removed, suggesting that the temporal partitioning is driven by interspecific competition. Such ex- treme temporal partitioning within the diel cycle has not previously been recorded elsewhere among mammals. Using artificial food patches, we studied microhabitat use and foraging efficiencies under seasonally variable predator regimes and physiological pressures to assess the roles that habitat structure and foraging behavior might play in coexistence. The two species showed trade-offs in foraging efficiency leading to different strategies of micro- habitat use that may help promote coexistence. A. cahirinus is a ''cream skimmer,'' a relatively inefficient forager that gives up at relatively high giving-up densities, and a habitat generalist; whereas A. russatus is a habitat specialist, perhaps compensating for this restricted niche by foraging very efficiently to low giving-up densities. Seasonal shifts in foraging microhabitat suggest that the response to predation risk from snakes in summer overrides and opposes the effects of physiological costs and risk from owls and diurnal raptors, leading to increased predatory risk and foraging microhabitat overlap in summer. Temporal partitioning of the food resource may compensate for decreased partitioning of the habitat resource in summer. Provision of cover was more important than escape distance in determining habitat and microhabitat use. Boulder fields in rocky deserts provide a physical structure that is more complex and provides more continuous cover than is available in open deserts, where most research on community structure of desert rodents has been carried out. We propose that this physical structure of rocky deserts, in conjunction with the desert adaptations of A. russatus, may enable the extreme temporal partitioning to opposite parts of the diel cycle and, therefore, contributes to coexistence in this community.

Subfields: Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/4e0dced0873950d999c01ceab3db2b06009143c2

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Citations in the corpus

TEMPORAL PARTITIONING: AN EXPERIMENT WITH TWO SPECIES OF SPINY MICE (2005, methodology): “The slight difference between our results and those of Jones et al. (2001) may reflect subtle differences in microhabitat structure between the enclosures and the field research sites.”
Effect of artificial night lighting on temporally partitioned spiny mice (2011, background): “The wire-mesh fence was permeable to spiny mouse predators (raptors, foxes, and snakes—Jones and Dayan 2000; Jones et al. 2001) and prey (vertebrates, seeds, and vegetation—Kronfeld-Schor and Dayan 1999); thus the enclosure structure provided seminatural conditions for our experiment.”
Hazardous duty pay and the foraging cost of predation (2004, background): “Two spiny mice, A. russatus and A. caharinus, coexist in rocky desert habitats of Israel and partition time, with the former species active during the day and the latter at night ( Jones et al. 2001 ).”
Diet specialisation and foraging efficiency under fluctuating vole abundance: a comparison between generalist and specialist avian predators (2011, unknown): “…studies compared the foraging efficiency of closely related vertebrate species characterised by different levels of trophic specialization and showed that, between species, specialisation is also usually associated with a higher efficiency (Huckins 1997, Jones et al. 2001, Britt and Bennet 2008).”
Activity patterns of rodents: the physiological ecology of biological rhythms (2008, background): “In the field, spiny mice are exposed to predation risk by owls, snakes, foxes, and probably also diurnal raptors, depending on their hour of activity (Jones et al. 2001).”