Zoogeochemical engineers: Galapagos giant tortoises link terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems through sediment transport and nutrient dynamics
Ellis Soto, D.; Crespo-Perez, V.; Pike, C. L.; Cabrera, F.; Penafiel, C.; Pierre-Paul, H.; Dutton, C. L.; Blake, S.; Post, D. M.; Subalusky, A. L.
Show abstract
Animal movements can transport materials across ecosystem boundaries, while simultaneously modifying habitats through physical engineering. We integrated GPS telemetry, camera trapping, sediment measurements and physicochemical sampling of ponds on Santa Cruz Island, Galapagos, to evaluate how giant tortoises connect and shape terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems. Telemetry revealed 2,254 visits by 21 tortoises to 12 ponds, with visits lasting up to 21.38 h and showing strong seasonal and diel variation, while camera traps showed peak pond use in January and during early morning and late afternoon. Greater tortoise abundance was associated with higher ammonium, dissolved organic carbon and total phosphorus concentrations, while ponds with persistently greater tortoise abundance had higher total suspended solids. Departing tortoises carried a mean 505.9 g of sediment, yielding a conservative potential export of 8.20 kg per tortoise per year and tens of tonnes annually. These findings identify giant tortoises as mobile zoogeochemical engineers linking terrestrial and freshwater ecosystems through physical and biogeochemical pathways.
Matching journals
The top 9 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
- Detrital Food Web Drives Aquatic Ecosystem Productivity in a Seasonally Inundated Managed Floodplain 94%
- Livestock as vectors of organic matter and nutrient loading in aquatic ecosystems in African savannas 93%
- Movement ecology of captive-bred axolotls in restored and artificial wetlands: conservation insights for amphibian reintroductions and translocations 93%
Similar papers in this journal
- Mapping differences in mammalian distributions and diversity using environmental DNA from rivers 92%
- Impact of Run-of-River Damming on Increasing Phytoplankton Biomass and Species Shift in a Large Amazonian River 91%
- Fish Blood Response to Ash-Induced Environmental Alkalinization, and their Implications to Wildfire-Scarred Watersheds 91%
Similar papers in this journal
- The diverse diet of southern Alaska resident killer whales changes across spatiotemporally distinct foraging aggregations 91%
- Intraspecific variation in migration timing of green sturgeon in the Sacramento River system 91%
- Let's Do the Time Warp Again: Non-linear time series matching as a tool for sequentially structured data in ecology 90%
Similar papers in this journal
- A Multi-Taxa Approach to Estuarine Biomonitoring: Assessing Vertebrate Biodiversity and Ecological Continuity using Environmental DNA Metabarcoding in the Rance River (Brittany, France) 93%
- Tiny killers: first record of rhabdocoel flatworms feeding on water flea embryos 92%
- Patterns and potential drivers of intraspecific variability in the body elemental composition of a terrestrial consumer, the snowshoe hare (Lepus americanus) 92%
Similar papers in this journal
- Polymetallic nodules are essential for food-web integrity of a prospective deep-seabed mining area in Pacific abyssal plains 92%
- Malayan kraits (Bungarus candidus) show affinity to anthropogenic structures in a human dominated landscape 92%
- Multi-marker DNA metabarcoding detects suites of environmental gradients from an urban harbour 92%
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.