Asian Eden : large herbivore ecology in India

The study of large mammalian herbivore ecology has a strong allometric tradition. The majority of studies that have helped better understand how body mass affects large herbivore ecology in the tropics, from a biological, functional, and ecological perspective, are from Africa. India’s large herbivore assemblage—the richest outside of Africa and with a body mass range similar to Africa’s—is a poorly understood assemblage that has never been studied from the perspective of body mass theory. The goal of this study was to bridge this gap. I tested hypotheses of large herbivore biology and ecology in India based on body mass theory across different spatial, temporal and organizational scales. Data collection and analyses included: a 20 month field study the provided data of forage availability, the seasonal variation in diet, habitat preference and overlap, the timing of parturition, and the life history traits of different body mass large herbivore species in South India; a year long treatment based exclosure field experiment that provided a better understanding of the seasonal variation in graminoid biomass and quality in South India; a country level analysis of the distribution of the large herbivore assemblage with respect to environmental covariates; and a modelling approach to determine the impact of body mass on reproductive biology. Results showed that body mass based principles offered explanations for some, but not all, of what I observed and predicted. This study for the first time proposes that the impact of body mass might explain why some smaller herbivore species show seasonality in annual parturition while some large herbivores species do not. Also, as predicted and similar to Africa, large herbivore species richness in India is highest in areas with high soil nutrients and intermediate moisture levels. Beyond this study, important questions that still remain are “Which environmental and ecological conditions shaped species richness in Africa to be four times higher than what is found in India?” As India remains the last stronghold—Asia’s Eden—for most of Asia’s large herbivores, there is a need for further studies of the biology and ecology of large herbivore species in India.

Bibliographic Details

Main Author:	Ahrestani, F.S.
Other Authors:	Prins, Herbert
Format:	Doctoral thesis biblioteca
Language:	English
Subjects:	animal ecology, distribution, feeding behaviour, gaur, india, large herbivores, seasonal variation, size, dierecologie, distributie, grootte, grote grazers, seizoenvariatie, voedingsgedrag,
Online Access:	https://research.wur.nl/en/publications/asian-eden-large-herbivore-ecology-in-india
Tags:	Add Tag No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!