Pablo AE Alarcón

INIBIOMA (Universidad Nacional del Comahue - CONICET)

Context Widespread globally, roads impact the distribution of wildlife by influencing habitat use and avoidance patterns near roadways and disrupting movement across them. Wildlife responses to roads are known to vary across species; however within species, the response to roads may depend on the season or the individual’s behavioral state. Object...

Changes in seasonal resource availability and in energetic requirements as offspring grow may force parents to change their trophic ecology throughout the breeding season. Brown skuas Stercorarius antarcticus breed in a highly seasonal environment where the availability of their main food resource changes during the season. We studied the feeding p...

Interactions involving ungulates and their predators are widely thought to shape ecological patterns and processes. Guanacos (Lama guanicoe) and pumas (Puma concolor) have coexisted in South America for at least one million years. Within Patagonian arid-land ecosystems, guanaco predation by pumas can account for high levels of mortality, but the po...

The Andean Condor (Vultur gryphus) is a culturally iconic wildlife symbol for the South American Andes, but is naturally found at very low population densities, and is increasingly threatened. Using the Range Wide Priority Setting methodology, we (a group of 38 Andean Condor experts) updated the Andean Condor historical range (3,230,061 km2), syste...

Sexual segregation is widely reported among sexually dimorphic species and generally attributed to intraspecific competition. Prey diversity and human activities can reinforce niche segregation by increasing resource heterogeneity. Here, we explored trophic and spatial sexual segregation in the only avian scavenger that exhibits pronounced sexual s...

***SPANISH VERSION AVAILABLE*** The Range-Wide Priority Setting Exercise aimed to assess the distribution and conservation status of the Andean condor, and consolidate all available information on the species, currently dispersed and scattered from all different sources, to be translated into a conservation strategy, including the participative def...

Significance Flapping flight is extremely costly for large birds, yet little is known about the conditions that force them to flap. We attached custom-made “flight recorders” to Andean condors, the world’s heaviest soaring birds, documenting every single wingbeat and when and how individuals gained altitude. Remarkably, condors flapped for only 1%...

Mobile species face an array of human threats across political boundaries, and their protection relies on identifying and prioritizing areas for conservation. Large avian scavengers are one of the widest ranging and most threatened species globally, and efforts to preserve them have come to the forefront of wildlife management. Vultures require acc...

Volcanic eruptions produce health changes in animals that may be associated with emitted gases and deposited ashes. We evaluated whether the Puyehue–Cordón Caulle volcanic eruption in 2011 produced health changes in the threatened Andean Condor (Vultur gryphus) living in the area most affected by the eruption, northwestern Patagonia. We studied cli...

The framing of environmental conservation has been changing, mainly towards a reconciliation between human needs and nature conservation. A major challenge of biosphere reserves (BRs) is the integration of biodiversity conservation and the sustainable development of local communities. Although these areas are large, they are often not large enough...

The study of wildlife health greatly contributes to understanding population dynamics and detecting conservation threats. The determination of the different fractions of plasma proteins (proteinogram) is an important laboratory tool to study wildlife health. The aim of this study was to characterize protein electrophoresis in wild Andean condors (V...

Telemetry-based movement research has become central for learning about the behavior, ecology and conservation of wide-ranging species. Particularly, early telemetry studies were conducted on vultures and condors due to three main reasons: i) these birds capture the curiosity of humans, ii) their large body size allows researchers to deploy large t...

The removal of nonnative species can lead to re-invasion by nonnative species, especially in communities with multiple co-occurring invaders. Biotic and abiotic conditions shape community structure, reducing the predictability of nonnative management. We evaluated plant community recovery after the removal of nonnative pines with an emphasis on the...

Over the last century, marine mammals have been dramatically reduced in the world's oceans. We examined evidence that this change caused dietary and foraging pattern shifts of the Andean condor (Vultur gryphus) in Patagonia. We hypothesized that, after the decrease in marine mammals and the increase in human use of coastlines, condor diet changed t...

Despite global conservation crises,widespread and poorly regulated toxic pesticides still cause preventable tragedies. Carbofuran, a carbamate pesticide, is the most implicated globally. In January,the latest and most shocking known poisoning incident in South America took place in Argentina, where a single Carbofuran baited sheep carcass set out b...

Animals are expected to synchronize activity routines with the temporal patterns at which resources appear in nature. Accordingly, species that depend on resources showing temporally mismatched patterns should be expected to schedule routines that balance the chances of exploiting each of them. Large avian scavengers depend on carcasses which are m...

Sex-related divergences in many phenotypic traits, such as morphology, physiology, and behavior, have widely been described in animals. These asymmetries may adapt the sexes to different subniches, but also may produce sex-specific optima for life-history traits, as well as different costs. In birds, long movements in search of food and intraspecif...

Resumen ∙ La Gaviota Cocinera (Larus dominicanus) es una especie generalista que ha expandido e incrementado sus poblaciones en Patagonia. Su capacidad para explotar el consumo de fuentes de alimento de origen antrópico, es uno de los factores que ha permitido esta expansión, tanto en ambientes marinos como dulceacuícolas. La colonización de nuevos...

The Kelp Gull (Larus dominicanus) is a generalist species undergoing a process of range expansion and population increase in Patagonia. The ability of utilizing anthropogenic waste is one of the factors that might have enabled this expansion into freshwater environments. Colonization of new environments could affect directly or indirectly other spe...

Understanding how organisms react to natural catastrophes is of special interest for ecologists and managers because they may drive changes in species distributions and abundance and indeed cause extinctions. Particularly, explosive volcanic eruptions promote major changes in the environment forcing organisms to make decisions, first allowing them...

Current changes in the environment and increases in threats to wildlife have prompted the need for a better understanding of species’ conservation requirements. Strategies for the conservation of large-sized animal species with large home ranges have included the creation of large protected areas, or for migrants, the creation of protected breeding...

The diet of the Neotropical Cormorant (Phalacrocorax brasilianus) was evaluated in the Limay River basin, a freshwater system invaded by exotic salmonids. Analyses of 106 pellets showed that fish were the most important prey (79.9% by numerical frequency and 86.2% by frequency of occurrence), followed by two crustacean species. Among fish, the most...

Populations of several species of gull are increasing worldwide as a result of a plentiful supply of anthropogenic food in urbanised environments. In light of this, we decided to examine the importance of anthropogenic food in the diet of a recently established colony of Kelp Gulls (Larus dominicanus). We collected 241 regurgitated pellets of the K...