Size-Mediated Trophic Interactions in Two Syntopic Forest Salamanders

Overview

Journal Animals (Basel)

Date 2023 Apr 28

PMID 37106844

Authors

Andrea Costa

Giacomo Rosa

Sebastiano Salvidio

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

Exploitative competition and interference competition differ in the way they affect re-source availability for competitors: in the former, organisms reduce resource availability for the competitors; in the latter, one organism actively prevents the competitor from accessing resources, independently of their availability. Our aim is to test for the presence of foraging competition in two forest-dwelling salamanders in Italy: and . We also aim at testing for size-mediated competition. We obtained stomach contents from 191 sampled individuals by means of stomach flushing at 8 sampling sites where both species occur. We focused our analysis on the core prey taxa shared by both species: Collembola and Acarina. We found that the foraging activity of is positively affected by body size and negatively affected by potential competitor's activity on the forest floor during the sampling, which also significantly weakened the positive relationship with body size. These results suggest the presence of an interference/interaction occurring between the two species and affecting the foraging activity of . This competitive interaction is size mediated and configured as interference competition rather than exploitative competition.

Citing Articles

Disentangling Exploitative and Interference Competition on Forest Dwelling Salamanders.

Rosa G, Salvidio S, Costa A Animals (Basel). 2023; 13(12).

PMID: 37370513 PMC: 10295282. DOI: 10.3390/ani13122003.

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