Research · Ecology
Who eats carrion, when and why, across Australia's deserts, forests and alps.
Carrion is a short-lived but rich resource. When an animal dies, a whole community of scavengers – from wedge-tailed eagles and dingoes to foxes, possums and invertebrates – competes to use it. How quickly that happens, and who gets there first, shapes nutrient cycling, predator–prey dynamics and the flow of energy through ecosystems.
My work uses experimentally placed kangaroo carcasses and camera traps, replicated across bioregions, habitats and seasons, to understand what drives scavenger activity and behaviour.
Royal Society Open Science
Using camera traps on 40 kangaroo carcasses in the Wolgan Valley, this study shows that scavengers pick favourite body parts. Wedge-tailed eagles often start at the head and abdomen, dingoes favour the tail, and those preferences shift with the season and as a carcass decays, while red foxes change their behaviour much less.
Biological Invasions
In the Australian Alps, invasive feral pigs found and used carcasses as often as, or more often than, native apex scavengers such as dingoes and wedge-tailed eagles.
Ecology and EvolutionOpen access
Oikos
Wedge-tailed eagles are Australia's apex avian scavenger. Monitoring 120 kangaroo carcasses across desert, forest and alpine bioregions, in open and closed habitats and warm and cool seasons, showed how strongly place and season shape when eagles scavenge and how they interact at carcasses.
