Vulture Exclusion Halves Large Carcass Decomposition Rates and Doubles Fly Abundance
Bibliographic record
Abstract
ABSTRACT Carcass consumption by scavengers plays a critical role in wildlife and human health by providing services that maintain ecosystem functioning and potentially mitigate disease spreading. Vultures are particularly efficient scavengers, but their populations have sharply declined in Europe, Asia and Africa, raising concerns about similar declines in the comparatively less studied species of the Americas. While the effects of vulture absence on other vertebrate scavengers have been examined, the impact on invertebrate scavengers and their role in carrion decomposition remains unexplored. To determine the effects of vulture decline, specifically neotropical cathartid vultures, we experimentally excluded this functional group from domestic pig carcasses (Sus scrofa) in Costa Rica, under different habitat conditions (grassland and forest) and across seasons with the aim to assess the impact of vulture exclusion on carrion decomposition and insect abundance. Vulture exclusion halved carcass decomposition rates relative to control carcasses without exclusion. Accordingly, vulture abundance at control carcasses was positively correlated with carcass decomposition rate. Vulture exclusion doubled fly abundance at carcasses relative to controls but did not significantly impact dung beetle abundance at carcasses. These findings suggest that neotropical vultures are instrumental in rapid carrion decomposition, a service that invertebrates alone cannot fully compensate for, underscoring the potential ecological and public health risks associated with neotropical vulture declines and increased flies at carrion sites. Further research is needed to understand the broader implications of vulture loss on ecosystem services and zoonotic disease transmission in the Neotropics.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".