ABOVE: © ISTOCK.COM, NICOLAMARGARET
The paper
E. le Roux et al., “Animal body size distribution influences the ratios of nutrients supplied to plants,” PNAS, doi:10.1073/pnas.2003269117, 2020.
Animals eat plants. Animals poop. Poop nourishes plants. It may sound simple, but it’s not. Elizabeth le Roux, an ecologist and Newton International Fellow at the University of Oxford, studies this complex cycle in the South African savanna, particularly as it relates to larger animals and how they differ from small species in their effects on ecosystems.
As a graduate student at Nelson Mandela University in South Africa, le Roux began investigating how animal dung varies across the grassy plains of Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park and whether that variation influences the local plant life. At 15 sites, she and her colleagues assessed the density of the vegetation, used camera traps to record how many of each animal species frequented a particular area and how long they stayed, ...
