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Full-Text Articles in Social and Behavioral Sciences
Climate-Induced Reaction Norms For Life-History Traits In Pythons, Beata Ujvari, Richard Shine, L Luiselli, Thomas R. Madsen
Climate-Induced Reaction Norms For Life-History Traits In Pythons, Beata Ujvari, Richard Shine, L Luiselli, Thomas R. Madsen
Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)
Climate change modelers predict increasingly frequent ''extreme events,'' so it is critical to quantify whether organismal responses (such as reproductive output) measured over the range of usual climatic conditions can predict responses under more extreme conditions. In a 20-year field study on water pythons (Liasis fuscus), we quantified the effects of climatically driven annual variation in food supply on demographic traits of female pythons (feeding rate, body size, body mass, and reproductive output). Reaction norms linking food supply to feeding rates and residual body mass were broadly linear, whereas norms linking food supply to female body size became curvilinear when …
How Well Do Predators Adjust To Climate-Mediated Shifts In Prey Distribution? A Study On Australian Water Pythons, Beata Ujvari, Rick Shine, Thomas Madsen
How Well Do Predators Adjust To Climate-Mediated Shifts In Prey Distribution? A Study On Australian Water Pythons, Beata Ujvari, Rick Shine, Thomas Madsen
Faculty of Science - Papers (Archive)
Climate change can move the spatial location of resources critical for population viability, and a species resilience to such changes will depend upon its ability to flexibly shift its activities away from no-longer-suitable sites to exploit new opportunities. Intuition suggests that vagile predators should be able to track spatial shifts in prey availability, but our data on water pythons (Liasis fuscus) in tropical Australia suggest a less encouraging scenario. These pythons undergo regular long-range (to .10 km) seasonal migrations to follow flooding-induced migrations by their prey (native dusky rats, Rattus colletti ). However, when an extreme flooding event virtually eliminated …