Abstract
Forage abundance, forage quality, and social factors are key elements of the foraging ecology of wild herbivores. For non-ruminant equids, forage-limited environments are likely to impose severe constraints on their foraging behaviour. We used a multi-scale approach to study foraging behaviour in kiang (Equus kiang), a wild equid inhabiting the high-altitude rangelands of the Tibetan Plateau. Using behavioural observations and vegetation sampling, we first assessed how patterns of plant abundance and quality affected (i) the instantaneous forage intake rate (fine scale) and (ii) the proportion of time spent foraging (coarse scale) across seasons. We also tested whether foraging behaviour differed among group types, between sex in adults, and between females of different reproductive status. At a fine scale, intake rate increased linearly with bite size and increased following a type II curvilinear function with biomass on feeding sites. Forage intake rate also increased linearly with plant quality. Male and female kiangs had similar intake rates. Likewise, gravid and lactating females had similar intake rates as barren and non-lactating females. At a coarse scale, kiangs spent longer time feeding in mesic than in xeric habitats, and spent more time feeding in early summer and fall than in late summer. Groups of adults with foals spent less time feeding than male groups and groups of adults without foals. Our findings suggest that kiangs use flexible foraging behaviours in relation to seasonal variations of vegetation quality and abundance, a likely outcome of the extreme seasonal conditions encountered on the Tibetan Plateau.
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Acknowledgments
Our research was funded by the Wildlife Conservation Society, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada and the Bureau International de l’Université Laval, Canada. We thank K. Gailson, S. Tsering, C. Namgyal, J. Namgyal and the Rupshu nomadic community for their invaluable help in the field. We also thank J.L. Fox (University of Tromsø), S. Sathyakumar (Wildlife Institute of India), S. Ul-Haaq, J. Thakpa (Department of Wildlife Protection of Jammu and Kashmir) and the Norwegian Agency for Development Cooperation (WII-UiTø ICP programme) for their logistical support. We are indebted to D.I. Rubenstein, D. Fortin, C. Dussault, J. Pastor and an anonymous reviewer for insightful comments on a previous version of the manuscript. Finally, we thank J. Mainguy, S. Hamel and A. Massé for their help with statistical analyses.
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Communicated by Gøran Ericsson.
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St-Louis, A., Côté, S.D. Foraging behaviour at multiple temporal scales in a wild alpine equid. Oecologia 169, 167–176 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-011-2166-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00442-011-2166-y