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Spatiotemporal habitat use of large African herbivores across a conservation border

The rapid expansion of human populations in East Africa increases human-wildlife interactions, particularly along borders of protected areas (PAs). This development calls for a better understanding of how humanmodified landscapes facilitate or exclude wildlife in savannas and whether these effects change through time. Here, we used camera traps to compare the distribution of 13 large herbivore species in Serengeti National Park with adjacent village lands used by livestock and people at both seasonal and diel cycle scales. The results show

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Testing the interspecific body size principle in ungulates: the smaller they come, the harder they groom

Tick removal grooming may be centrally regulated by an internal timing mechanism operating to remove ticks before they attach and engorge (programmed grooming model) and/or evoked by cutaneous stimulation from tick bites (stimulus-driven model). The programmed grooming model predicts that organismic and environmental factors that impact the cost–benefit ratio of grooming (e.g. body size and habitat) will influence the rate of tick removal grooming. The body size principle predicts that smaller-sized animals, because of their greater surface-to-mass ratio, should engage

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DNA metabarcoding illuminates dietary niche partitioning by African large herbivores

Niche partitioning facilitates species coexistence in a world of limited resources, thereby enriching biodiversity. For decades, biologists have sought to understand how diverse assemblages of large mammalian herbivores (LMH) partition food resources. Several complementary mechanisms have been identified, including differential consumption of grasses versus nongrasses and spatiotemporal stratification in use of different parts of the same plant. However, the extent to which LMH partition food-plant species is largely unknown because comprehensive species-level identification is prohibitively difficult with traditional methods. We

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