Biology Publications
Document Type
Article
Publication Date
2-23-2016
Journal
Nature Communications
Volume
7
URL with Digital Object Identifier
10.1038/ncomms10698
Abstract
The fear large carnivores inspire, independent of their direct killing of prey, may itself cause cascading effects down food webs potentially critical for conserving ecosystem function, particularly by affecting large herbivores and mesocarnivores. However, the evidence of this has been repeatedly challenged because it remains experimentally untested. Here we show that experimentally manipulating fear itself in free-living mesocarnivore (raccoon) populations using month-long playbacks of large carnivore vocalizations caused just such cascading effects, reducing mesocarnivore foraging to the benefit of the mesocarnivore's prey, which in turn affected a competitor and prey of the mesocarnivore's prey. We further report that by experimentally restoring the fear of large carnivores in our study system, where most large carnivores have been extirpated, we succeeded in reversing this mesocarnivore's impacts. We suggest that our results reinforce the need to conserve large carnivores given the significant "ecosystem service" the fear of them provides.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Citation of this paper:
Suraci, J., Clinchy, M., Dill, L. et al. Fear of large carnivores causes a trophic cascade. Nat Commun 7, 10698 (2016). https://doi.org/10.1038/ncomms10698
