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Chapter 12 - Herbivore Abundance: Bottom-up and Top-down Influences

from Part III - The Big Mammal Menagerie: Herbivores, Carnivores and Their Ecosystem Impacts

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 September 2021

Norman Owen-Smith
Norman Owen-Smith
Affiliation:
University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg
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Summary

This chapter compares the potential impacts of seasonal food abundance and predation risks on herbivore populations. It describes how herbivore species differ in their response to seasonal rainfall variation. Major droughts can induce severe population crashes. Abundant water accentuates local food depletion. Food shortages may cause animals to incur greater exposure to predation so that bottom-up and top-down influences are entangled. Demographic shifts may lower prey vulnerability to population growth rates, dependent on body size, and sustainable recruitment thresholds. Savanna ungulates differ in the breadth and seasonal timing of birth seasons. Medium–large grazing ruminants produce the most biomass annually. Browsers and equids are consistently less abundant than grazers, while smaller herbivores are more narrowly distributed regionally. Populations also expand and contract in their distribution.

Keywords

population fluctuationsfood limitationseasonal contributionspredation riskprey vulnerabilitydemographic bufferinghabitat refugesmigrationsreproductive seasonalityallometry of abundancedistributional shifts
Type
Chapter
Information
Only in Africa
The Ecology of Human Evolution
 , pp. 181 - 198
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2021

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References

Suggested Further Reading

Owen-Smith, N. (1988) Megaherbivores. The Influence of Very Large Body Size on Ecology. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.Google Scholar
Owen-Smith, N. (2010) Dynamics of Large Herbivore Populations in Changing Environments. Wiley-Blackwell, Oxford.Google Scholar

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