Problem:
Find an example of the concept your peer 'taught' as it applies to a non-ungulate species. Describe the example and expand on the explanation of the concept. Need Assignment Help?
Respond to the concept your peer had questions about and try to teach them what you have learned and provide an explanation that might clarify the concept.
Provide a source in JWM format
Concept
Hello everyone. For this week's discussion board, the topics I chose were nutritional carrying capacity and compensatory versus additive mortality. These concepts will highlight how ecology, nutrition, and management all interact in ungulate populations. The topic of interest I chose was nutritional carrying capacity. Traditional carrying capacity, or K, assumes stable environment, but as we read this week, ungulates live in variable conditions due to environmental shifts, so forage shifts, drought, flooding, and managers need flexible, measurable indicators of population health. Natural care, nutritional carrying capacity, defined by Bontief, is defined as births equal deaths, so population growth rate R equals zero. This means when the population has poor body condition, they are near or above nutritional carrying capacity, but when the population has good body condition, the population is below or capable of growth. Measuring NCC in the field can be done by body fat indices via ultrasounds and bone marrow fat, ***** nitrogen levels, which are used to measure diet quality, and reproductive investments, so pregnancy and lactation. An example comes from one of Monteith's studies where they applied this NCC model, this NCC model, in a population of mule deer in Wyoming. They found that when deer entered winter with low-fat reserves, the fawn survival declined sharply in the following spring. But when they were able to adjust harvest levels and improved habitat conditions, the recruitment increased. This is a figure from that study, and I'm going to very quickly try to go over it. The hatch lines is the estimated region for the population's nutritional condition and where they should lie. And this figure overall shows that populations can shift depending on annual conditions, but that the predicted population trend does tend to fall within the estimated range of survival based upon the nutritional condition of the herd. Very quickly, compensatory versus additive mortality. Compensatory mortality is when one source replaces another so there's no net change. So if an animal dies from malnutrition, then removal via harvest doesn't increase total loss or total deaths. But additive mortality would be if an animal would not naturally die because habitat quality is good, removal via harvest would add to total deaths. And that leads me into the topic I chose for my area of confusion and I air quote confusion because I'm not necessarily confused on the theoretical differences between additive mortality but rather how wildlife managers are expected to distinguish and respond to these processes in real world systems. Because in the real world there are uncontrolled variables. Think car accidents, think hunters not properly or appropriately tagging harvest, disease outbreak. So taking just those
quick examples and also considering populations responding to habitat changes, seasonal nutrition, and varying weather. How can managers not only identify which mortality is actually occurring to adjust harvest limits or conservation strategies before these conditions shift again. I understand the biology behind it. I'm just not grasping how this is actually done before conditions change again. Thank you for listening. I went a little over. Everyone have a great week.