Surface water dependency among Kalahari Desert birds
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Ecology, Zoology, Anatomy and Physiology, Biosphere Interactions
- Keywords
- water balance, evaporative water loss, stable isotopes, metabolic water, drinking behaviours, surface water, preformed water
- Copyright
- © 2017 Smit et al.
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. Surface water dependency among Kalahari Desert birds. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3167v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3167v1
Abstract
The availability of free-standing water sources is a key determinant of animal and plant community structure in arid environments, and an understanding of the extent to which particular species depend on drinking water is vital for modelling the effects of climate change on desert avifauna. We investigated interspecific variation in dependence on artificial water sources among birds in the Kalahari Desert, South Africa, by 1) observations at waterholes and 2) tracing spatial water-use patterns during summer using isotopically-labelled water and blood sampling. More than 50 % of the avian community (primarily insectivores and omnivores) were not observed to drink. The majority (53%) of species drinking at waterholes were granivorous, and most visited waterholes daily. Blood samples revealed that only 11 of 42 species (again, mostly granivores) showed evidence of drinking at a waterhole labelled with deuterium, with between 2.2 and 92.9 % of individual birds’ body water pools originating from the labelled waterhole. These findings illustrate how two methods employed in this study provide different but complementary data on the relative importance of a water source for an avian community. Although our results suggest that most species are independent of drinking, drinking patterns on the hottest days during our study period suggest that free-standing water might become more important for some of the non-drinking species under hotter climatic conditions.
Author Comment
This is a draft manuscript, to be submitted for peer review.