Adam Rosenblatt

University of North Florida | UNF

Human‐driven land use change can fundamentally alter ecological communities, especially the diversity and abundance of large‐bodied predators. Yet, despite the important roles large‐bodied predators play in structuring communities through feeding, there have been only a few investigations of how the feeding patterns of large‐bodied predators change...

Providing enrichment that expands the range of behavioral opportunities associated with food acquisition and environmental exploration is an important contributing factor to the well-being of zoo animals. These behaviors can be difficult to promote in carnivores, given their foraging strategies and the logistical, ethical, and financial challenges...

The body condition of an animal is an indicator of health status and is dependent upon many factors, some of which can vary between wild and captive settings. Despite this, there have not been many studies on how captivity affects body condition relative to wild animal populations. This study explores the body condition of captive and wild American...

Wildlife tourism, including tourism involving large predators, is a rapidly growing industry that can generate many conservation and economic benefits. Monetary values can be derived for populations of large predators, and even individuals, on the basis of how much money tourists spend to see and interact with these awe-inspiring animals, but valua...

The black caiman (Melanosuchus niger) is one of the largest predators in South America, yet we know little about adult diets. We studied stomach contents of adults in Guyana and found the largest individuals target mammals instead of fish and males exhibit cannibalism, a behavior never recorded for this species previously. The black caiman (Melanos...

Food web rewiring is becoming more likely as climate change continues, yet few experimental studies have focused on it and even fewer have examined the effects of two or more climate variables simultaneously. To help fill this gap the current study examined the effects of warming and drought, both alone and in combination, on herbivore feeding beha...

Urbanization impacts wildlife, yet research has been limited to few taxa. American alligators (Alligator mississippiensis) are apex predators that have received minimal attention within urban areas. We investigated potential effects of urban land use on alligators through surveys of relative alligator abundance in nine tributaries of the lower St....

Large‐bodied predators are well represented among the world's threatened and endangered species. A significant body of literature shows that in terrestrial and marine ecosystems large predators can play important roles in ecosystem structure and functioning. By contrast, the ecological roles and importance of large predators within freshwater ecosy...

Tool use has been documented across a diverse array of animals; however, this behavior has received little attention in reptiles. Recently, researchers reported observations of two crocodilian species apparently using sticks as lures to aid in the capture of nesting birds, but the evidence for the behavior was anecdotal and correlative. To explore...

Ecosystem Fragmentation and Connectivity LEGACIES AND FUTURE IMPLICATIONS OF A RESTORED EVERGLADES • A century of fragmentation and novel hydrologic and ecological connectivity characterize the postdrainage Everglades landscape. • Human engineering has dramatically reduced the spatiotemporal patterns of connectivity that characterized the predra...

Satellite telemetry is an increasingly utilized technology in wildlife research, and current devices can track individual animal movements at unprecedented spatial and temporal resolutions. However, as we enter the golden age of satellite telemetry, we need an in-depth understanding of the main technological, species-specific and environmental fact...

R-code for boosted beta regression (Fix acquisition rate). (R)

Covariate partial effects on the variability of the fix acquisition rate. (PDF)

Tagged individuals per species. (PDF)

Covariate partial effects on the variability of the Overall fix success rate. (PDF)

Trends in observed data. (PDF)

Global dataset for boosted beta regressions. (CSV)

Description of data fields in S1 Data. (CSV)

Satellite telemetry articles published. (PDF)

Distribution of response variables and covariates. (PDF)

Unit purchase and operation costs. (PDF)

R-code for boosted beta regression (Overall fix success rate). (R)

Standardized data collection questionnaire. (PDF)

Satellite telemetry evaluations. (PDF)

The inability of species to adapt to changing climate may cause ecological communities to disassemble and lose ecological functioning. However, theory suggests that communities may be resilient whenever populations within species exhibit variation in thermal plasticity or adaptation whereby thermally tolerant populations replace thermally sensitive...

Ecological effects of climate change are difficult to predict because climate change is a multi‐variable phenomenon that can impact ecosystems through diverse pathways. Despite this fact, climate change ecology research has been dominated by relatively simplistic experiments and models. To test the importance of assessing more realistic climate and...

The American alligator (Alligator mississippiensis) is a keystone species that exhibits strong top-down effects on both ecosystem structure and function. As a highly mobile predator, alligators can link spatially segregated food webs and influence prey abundance, composition, and behavior across space and time. Therefore, understanding alligator mo...

Climate change is expected to favor smaller-bodied organisms through effects of temperature on physiological performance and food-web interactions, so much so that smaller body size has been touted as a universal response to global warming alongside range shifts and changing phenology. However, climate change involves more than warming. It is multi...

Over the last five U.S. presidential election cycles, public concern about environmental issues has seemingly declined while concerns about national security and economic issues have remained steady or increased. These changes in public attitudes have been associated with decreased attention to environmental issues amongst policymakers, a situation...

Prey at risk of predation may experience stress and respond physiologically by altering their metabolic rates. Theory predicts that such physiological changes should alter prey nutrient demands from N-rich to C-rich macronutrients and shift the balance between maintenance and growth/reproduction. Theory further suggests that for ectotherms temperat...

Intraspecific variation in ecologically relevant traits is widespread. In generalist predators in particular, individual diet specialization is likely to have important consequences for food webs. Understanding individual diet specialization empirically requires the ability to quantify individual diet preferences accurately. Here we compare the cur...

Soil carbon (C) storage is a major component of the carbon cycle. Consensus holds that soil C uptake and storage is regulated by plant–microbe–soil interactions. However, the contribution of animals in aboveground food webs to this process has been overlooked. Using insights from prior long-term experimentation in an old-field ecosystem and mathema...

Within oligotrophic ecosystems, resource limitations coupled with interspecific variation in morphology, physiology, and life history traits may lead to niche partitioning among species. How generalist predators partition resources and their mechanisms, however, remain unclear across many ecosystems. We quantified niche partitioning among upper tro...

Frugivory followed by seed dispersal is a mutualistic relationship between animals and plants. In the case of reptiles, this phenomenon has been reported in some lizards, turtles and iguanas. It has recently become apparent that frugivory is common across many species of crocodilians. However, it is unknown if crocodilians can effectively disperse...

Climate change ecology has focused on climate effects on trophic interactions through the lenses of temperature effects on organismal physiology and phenological asynchronies. Trophic interactions are also affected by the nutrient content of resources, but this topic has received less attention. Using concepts from nutritional ecology, we propose a...

Predicting food web responses to climate change can be difficult because of the potentially complex interplay between co-occurring climate variables and multiple interacting species across trophic levels. The large majority of research in this field has focused on understanding the effects of single climate variables on species at one or two trophi...

The ability of species to tolerate a warming climate has important implications for ecological functioning. Theory and empirical synthesis suggest species adapted to more thermally variable climates are more capable of acclimating to rising temperatures, and are therefore characterized by greater phenotypic plasticity, than species adapted to less...

Prey at risk of predation may experience stress and respond physiologically by altering their metabolic rates. Theory predicts that such physiological changes should alter prey nutrient demands from N-rich to C-rich macronutrients and shift the balance between maintenance and growth/reproduction. Theory further suggests that for ectotherms, tempera...

We conducted a study of black caiman (Melanosuchus niger) growth rates using data from a long-term mark-recapture study carried out in the Rupununi region of Guyana between 2005 and 2015. In contrast to previous studies, growth rates of black caiman declined with increasing size and this decline occurred more rapidly for females. Size-at-age models...

Individual niche specialization (INS) is increasingly recognized as an important component of ecological and evolutionary dynamics. However, most studies that have investigated INS have focused on the effects of niche width and inter- and intraspecific competition on INS in small-bodied species for short time periods, with less attention paid to IN...

Climate change is expected to simultaneously alter many of the abiotic qualities of ecosystems as well as biotic interactions, especially trophic interactions. However, research to date has mostly focused on elucidating the effects of single climate change variables on individual species. Here, we use established meta-analysis techniques to synthes...

Species management and conservation strategies require accurate information about species distributions and behaviors. Neovison vison evergladensis (Everglades Mink) is listed in Florida as threatened, yet its current population status and distribution are unknown. We report the first incontrovertible evidence of the occurrence of Everglades Mink i...

Many animal species are important dispersers of seeds; however, relatively little attention has been paid to the seed-dispersal capabilities of reptiles, and almost nothing is known about the seed-dispersal capabilities of crocodilians. This lack of information is surprising given that seeds have been found in the stomach contents of a majority of...

During recent human history, human activities such as overhunting and habitat destruction have severely impacted many large top predator populations around the world. Studies from a variety of ecosystems show that loss or diminishment of top predator populations can have serious consequences for population and community dynamics and ecosystem stabi...

Saurochory (seed dispersal by reptiles) among crocodilians has largely been ignored, probably because these reptiles are generally assumed to be obligate carnivores incapable of digesting vegetable proteins and polysaccharides. Herein we review the literature on crocodilian diet, foraging ecology, digestive physiology and movement patterns, and pro...

Abstract Stable isotope analysis has become a standard ecological tool for elucidating feeding relationships of organisms and determining food web structure and connectivity. There remain important questions concerning rates at which stable isotope values are incorporated into tissues (turnover rates) and the change in isotope value between a tissu...

Stomach contents analysis (SCA) provides a snap-shot observation of a consumer's diet. Interpretation of SCA data can be complicated by many factors, including variation in gastric residence times and digestion rates among prey taxa. Although some SCA methods are reported to efficiently remove all stomach contents, the effectiveness of these techni...

Stable isotope analysis has emerged as one of the primary means for examining the structure and dynamics of food webs, and numerous analytical approaches are now commonly used in the field. Techniques range from simple, qualitative inferences based on the isotopic niche, to Bayesian mixing models that can be used to characterize food-web structure...

1. Highly mobile top predators are hypothesized to spatially and/or temporally link disparate habitats through the combination of their movement and feeding patterns, but recent studies suggest that individual specialization in habitat use and feeding could keep habitats compartmentalized. 2. We used passive acoustic telemetry and stable isotope an...

An effective biology program requires that students learn the core biology material, be proficient in other subjects (such as calculus and statistics) and develop related skills (laboratory and critical thinking), for a holistic under-standing of biological concepts. Conventional biology departments typically require courses like calculus and/or st...