Leave or Die: Dispersal of Red-Bellied Mudsnakes ( Farancia abacura ) from their Home Ranges in an Isolated Wetland
- PDF / 6,583,484 Bytes
- 10 Pages / 595.276 x 790.866 pts Page_size
- 47 Downloads / 135 Views
WETLANDS CONSERVATION
Leave or Die: Dispersal of Red-Bellied Mudsnakes (Farancia abacura) from their Home Ranges in an Isolated Wetland Michael V. Plummer 1
&
Caleb S. O’Neal 1,2 & Steven M. Cooper 1 & Ryan Stork 1 & Nathan E. Mills 1 & Aric B. McKinney 1
Received: 23 June 2020 / Accepted: 13 August 2020 # Society of Wetland Scientists 2020
Abstract We radiotracked eight, free-living, Red-Bellied Mudsnakes (Farancia abacura) from April to October 2019 in a bottomland hardwood forest wetland in Central Arkansas. Four snakes emerged in April from their overwintering sites in an earthen dam of a 1.2 ha pond and confined all of their movements to the pond basin. All four snakes were lost to predators during the course of the year. Four other snakes emerged from overwintering and dispersed up to 1580 m from the pond. One dispersing snake was lost to a predator when it returned to the pond. Dispersing snakes followed ephemeral streams upstream and downstream, ditches, and flooded bottomlands. The dispersal movements occurred in an extraordinarily wet period that began in August 2018 and continued through August 2019. These results contrasted sharply with the radiotracking results of eight, free-living, F. abacura at the same locality in 2018, each of which maintained a home range in the pond and experienced no predation. Included in the eight 2018 snakes were three of the dispersing snakes radiotracked in 2019. Possible year-to-year variation in movement patterns driven by environmental variability and predator pressure should be considered in designing management plans for at-risk wetland species. Keywords Dispersal . Home range . Precipitation . Predation . Snake movement . Wetland
Introduction Movement is considered a basic characteristic of animal life. It is therefore unsurprising that questions concerning why, how, when, and where animals move are among the most common questions in ecology today (Nathan et al. 2008; Sutherland et al. 2013). Describing the movement of species and developing effective models for understanding these movements has taken on new urgency as increasing numbers of species face population declines in shrinking habitats. Information on the movement ecology of animals is a valuable component of most management plans and a component for which there is frequently inadequate data available (Fraser et al. 2018). The movements of an animal within its environment reflect an interplay among the animal’s phenotype and external * Michael V. Plummer [email protected] 1
Department of Biology, Harding University, Searcy, AR 72143, USA
2
Department of Biology, Missouri State University, Springfield, MO 65897, USA
stimuli it experiences. More specifically, movements reflect the morphology, physiology, and life history of an animal as it accesses appropriate abiotic conditions, obtains resources, and minimizes harmful interactions with other species (e.g. parasitism, predation, and competition) (Clobert et al. 2009). We generally expect that if we track an animal long enough we will be able to de
Data Loading...
