Rodent Societies: An Ecological & Evolutionary Perspective

black-tailed prairie dog) is “vulnerable.” Merriam’s and Townsend’s ground squirrels are “apparently secure,” that is, uncommon ...

Figure 39.3 Ranges of “larger” ground squirrels (average body length 22.5 –30.5 cm; Patterson et al. 2003). Range sizes are dist ...

suppression, logging, and grazing (Crane and Fischer 1986; Steele et al. 1986; Sherman and Runge 2002), and by inva- sion of exo ...

torically limited ranges. The round-tailed ground squir- rel has lost about half of its historic range to urban land conversion. ...

However, burrow use and diets place strong energetic constraints on these animals, and it appears that these “bottom-up” factors ...

are near their minimum annual body mass, as compared to late fall /early winter, when larger temperature drops are re- quired to ...

northern boreal forest demonstrated a two-fold increase in population density associated with removal of predators, but a four-f ...

arid parts of the ranges. Two or three years of unsuccess- ful reproduction on a level with what has been observed in single yea ...

T he black-tailed prairie dog(Cynomys lu- dovicianus,hereafter “prairie dog”) currently in- habits 2% of the area that it occup ...

200 years: toxic baits have killed billions of prairie dogs, and recreational shooting has eliminated millions more. Where Have ...

prairie dogs have not evolved a good defense against plague, and consequently remain highly susceptible — so that mor- tality wi ...

of forage partially offsets the lower plant biomass at col- ony sites, and the higher quality might help to explain the preferen ...

dogs will remain at the new site for 1 week; most of the others will perish as they disperse in search of their genetic relativ ...

Mollify negative attitudes With the possible exception of plague, the most serious threat to the long-term survival of prairie d ...

P opulation and community ecologists tend to focus on the obvious. Unlike many other branches of biology, the focal entities (po ...

namics other than a few well-studied cases, such as plague (etiological agent, Yersinia pestis) decimating populations of prairi ...

to the pathogen, that is, whether they are infected (I) or un- infected and susceptible (S). In some cases, when infection is fo ...

Clearly, the consequences of density-dependent versus frequency-dependent transmission for both hosts and path- ogens are profou ...

viduals are more likely to be infected than are females and younger individuals (Childs et al. 1987; Glass et al. 1988; Niklasso ...

from females to males, compared to male-to-female trans- mission. To our knowledge, this possibility has not been as- sessed. Wi ...