Results
A total of 17 chicken carcasses were used for carrion removal
experiments. Control carcasses persisted and were monitored up to 15
days), microbe treatment carcasses up to 14 days, and invertebrate
treatment carcasses up to 12 days. Carcasses placed for vertebrate
consumption were removed by scavengers within one day of carcass
placement. The proportion of carrion biomass remaining over time
differed between treatments (figure 2). Comparison of hypothesis found
maximum support for the interactive effect of time and treatment on
carrion removal rate. Model parameter estimates indicated fastest
removal of carcass under vertebrate scavenging followed by invertebrate
scavenging, and negligible difference in carrion loss rates between
decomposition and evaporation.
The parameter estimates of the best model showing individual effects of
treatments on logit-transformed proportional loss of carrion biomass
(Table 1) represent the logit-transformed proportional loss of carrion
biomass each day under the different treatments. The inverse
logit-transformations of these estimates gives us the change in
proportion of carrion biomass each day, while the negative sign connotes
a loss in biomass. For example, with each passing day, proportion of
carrion biomass reduces by 0.99 due to vertebrate scavenging (Time x
vertebrate scavenging) (Table 1). For invertebrate scavenging,
proportion of carrion lost each day is 0.5, and it is 0.51 for microbial
decomposition. Daily loss of carrion biomass due to evaporative moisture
loss alone (Control) was estimated at 3.6%. Besides this, microbial
decomposition per se resulted in 3.8% loss of carrion biomass
and invertebrate scavengers per se resulted in 7.3% loss of
carrion biomass daily. In contrast, vertebrate scavengers per seresulted in 83% loss of carrion biomass per day. The compounded effect
of vertebrate scavenging along with invertebrate scavenging and
microbial decomposition caused 99.9% carrion removal in a day (Table
2).